We can't stop people from having kids. We can try and conserve natural resources, but eventually the number of people will be more than the planet can support.
Over-population is not quite the problem you think it is. In the United States, pop growth has slowed to a crawl, and most of our growth is due to immigration.
Developed countries the world over have slow (and declining) birthrates. Heck, Italy is trying to encourage their population to reproduce - they are suffering from net population decrease!
There are a number of reasons for this. Affluent people tend to have fewer kids, merely because they are a hassle. In the more impoverished nations, existing infrastructure is failing to provide for current needs, let alone future growth. For example, one of the largest mass poisonings ever in human history is taking place in Asia because of arsenic-laced drinking water.
<RANT>
What truly amazes me is the sheer number of people who don't google whatever they're talking about before they say it. The volume of uninformed, stupid comments on the Internet that can be corrected with 10 minutes of googling and quick research is mind-boggling.
People with access to this kind of information should not be making the stupid comments they are. That they do, anyway, and don't get flogged on the streets is a mere testament to the fact that humanity does not yet value intelligence and critical thinking over stupidity.
I daresay we are entering a new era of humanity - the era of the informed but ignorant idiot. The information is there - cheap, easily available. Tools that our ancestors would have killed for - and we use it to pass along mundane drivel because "we feel" or "we think" rather than actually use that tool to anywhere near its true potential.
Sad. TV is used for network television and advertising, instead of mass education and information. News shows on TV are remarkably shallow and uninformative. The best bet are the "nature" shows, which are nice but curiously designed towards complacency.
We are in the middle of a mass extinction event brought about, no doubt, by people who chcose not to be informed, and make decisions based on ego and inadequate information.
I can't claim to know anything at all about the dynamics of Norway, but here in California (you know, it's mighty cold when it's below 50 degrees!) piped natural gas heat is generally cheaper than electricity.
Thus, it's cheaper to use the gas heater than to try to offset the cheap gas heat with expensive electricity.
...and the reason that I'd, uh, consider downloading a movie - ADS.
Well done! You actually had me for a second! Talk about EXCELLENT trolling... it wasn't until I noticed the "uh," did I catch the sarcasm!
I was going to say something like "So, you'd rather sit and wait through 6 hours of downloading torrents than just show up 10 minutes late to the movie?" or "What a crock of crap. I can't believe you'd stoop this low and stand on ground this weak to justify your intent to violate copyrights!".
But, it's funny, see? I wish I had mod points - You'd get a +1 funny from me...
Look, anyone can enter the market (any market). It just requires capital.
This is perhaps the only piece of your post that isn't utterly worthless. But, what happens when the cost of entry is measured in the BILLIONS of dollars? Suddenly, not just "anyone" can enter...
So long as entry is not limited (by laws or other regulations), one company cannot be a monopoly.
What a load of crap. You have no idea what you are writing about.
but once they begin to use their *monopoly* advantage, new companies are born to compete, which drives down the prices again.
And, perhaps you could explain how this is so?
Sherman Anti-trust Act -> pure stupidity. The effects of the ATT breakup are still being felt, and they are nothing good.
I guess you don't remember the days when telephones were not private property and were rented from the telephone company? I guess you don't remember paying $0.45 per minute for a scratchy telephone connection to a nearby town? Or when there were *no* long distance alternatives? Or when it took a month or more to get a phone line installed?
Perhaps changing these things are "nothing good"?
Already, SBC is exerting its near monopoly pressure on California ISPs and broadband providers. If you were even mildly involved (say, with CISPA, California Internet Service Providers Association) you would know this. It's a constant battle that costs consumers many millions anually.
The Internet itself largely stems from govornment regulation forcing the monopoly telecommunications companies (primarily, AT&T) to allow consumers to rent a lease-line! That decision, the mid-70's, was a big deal that the telecommunications companies fought bitterly against.
If that hadn't happened, our beloved Internet would have died on the vine as an irrelevant academic curiosity...
But, I guess you won't let these (and plenty of other) facts get in the way of your (uninformed, naive) opinion...
As father of five kids, with seven people in the house, basic things such as double-paned windows, water-saving shower heads, gas dryer, hot-water blankets, compact flourescent bulbs, and so on have been the mainstay.
If this was not the case, my monthly utility bill (in California) would easily hit $500-$600/mo. As it is, we're lucky to have bills typically in the $200-$300 range. (I have two mini-servers for my business that are never off)
Often, these kinds of things provide clear advantages beyond merely saving money.
Recently, the water-saving shower head in the downstairs bathroom broke, and I screwed on the original shower head, which I still had in the shed, thinking this would "get us by" until I could get in for another one.
Boy, was I wrong! With the old shower head, we could shower everybody in the household, one right after another in about one or two hours, including dressing.
But, with the new shower head, we ran out of hot water within 20 minutes, making showering everybody nearly an all-day venture while we waited for the hot-water heater to catch up.
Once, my son left the shower running hot water all night long, and in the morning, we found the shower going, and there was still plenty of hot water!
Another example: Flourescent bulbs not only use far less energy than incandescent, they also last much longer (who wants to replace light bulbs once a month?) and don't heat up the house.
I noticed the difference when I changed out the three 60-watt bulbs on the living room fam with three 15-watt flourescent! The room was, if anything, brighter, and, previously, when the fan was on low, you could FEEL the heat coming off those three 60-watt bulbs!
Double-paned windows mean that my teen children can blare their punk music as loud as they want to without pissing off the neighbors. Also, we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
Also, in the winter time, you can sit next to the windows and not feel cold. That adds much to my sense of well-being on a cold winter morning...
Embrace conservation. It doesn't *have* to be a hassle!
Its not over priced just because its more then you want to spend. Untill you figure out how basic economics work, there's just no helping you. Or would you be OK with your employer deciding that your services are overpriced so they wont be paying you anymore (but dont stop showing up for work)?
Until you figure out how basic economics work in a monopoly condition, you'll continue spitting out tripe such as this.
The fact is, when a marketplace is in a state of monopoly, the employer can decide to change your wages, and you'd still be forced to show up the next day because you have little/no choice. (borrowing from your example, here)
Free market economics are a fiction. A truly free market (with no restrictions) quickly degrades into a monopolistic market, with one or just a few dominant players that control each industry.
Offsetting this tendency is our government, which has the onerous task of encouraging (and in some cases, enforcing) relatively free, competetive markets to develop.
One of the ways it does this is by limiting the power of monopolies to leverage their unfair advantage to prevent competition in new areas. EG: Sherman Anti-trust Act.
If you hang around here, you'll see phrases like "convicted monopolist" in conjunction with Microsoft. That's because, in the desktop software market, they have a monopoly, and have been found repeatedly abusing that monopoly position to thwart competition in other industries. (EG: The browser marketplace was all but destroyed by Microsoft by leveraging its dominance in the Operating System market)
Do some reading before you spout - you just might learn something!
Dealing with RH's model I think will be a bit harder.
Red Hat has largely marginalized themselves. In aiming for "the enterprise" they largely gave up their biggest promotion base - the grassroots. How many people have switched away from Red Hat in the past year?
Red Hat 7.x, 8, and 9 were awesome - and the support was very good. I could deploy today for free, and expect that if things worked out, I could pay for support later.
But that's no longer the case. I can either deploy with the big, expensive "Advanced" line, or Fedora. There's no upgrade path from Fedora, either.
Consequently, I'm in the middle of migrating about 18 servers away from RedHat - revenue to RH dipped about $1000/year from me - and I've called the company exactly twice for support.
Pretty stupid, if you ask me.
Now, with their Fedora / Advance NNN split, I can no longer consolidate the smaller, embedded servers with the same administration platform as the far busier primary servers - they are different enough that administration costs escalate. And Fedora is annoyingly buggy.
Thus, I'm busy migrating everything to Debian, just for the uniformity and long term consistency of the platform!
Red Hat is busy marginalizing themselves, while Novell has always had the best support in the industry. As long as Novell is reasonable and manages to provide a decent support path for the little guys, too, they are well positioned to make a killing.
dump email all together [sic].... where are the flaws in this reasoning?
1) You aren't a businessman. Don't pretend you are, and certainly don't pretend you know how things should be when running one.
2) Businesses are there to make money. Thus, the cardinal rule of business is... don't say "no" to money. In any form. If you turn away customers by not being available for them, you are, in effect, saying "no" to money.
Show me that it won't result in having to say "Sorry mr. corporate contact..." and you might have something. Otherwise, that noise is just your butt cheeks flapping together pointlessly.
I really think Slashdot updating their HTML would be _much_ harder than what was suggested above. MUUUUUCH harder. I think what was suggested above will happen much sooner.
If you could suggest to me a new applications that needs over 8 billion times more storage capacity as top-of-the-range current systems, please, go ahead and introduce it. Just don't ask me for financing.
Please read what I wrote! Or, is the word "unpredictable" not in your comprehension? Try reading this, word for word, and see if your response does anything but make you sound like an idiot:
"3) New applications: Broadband didn't just result in really fast web-page downloads - the entire online music industry stems from that. The original creators of TCP/IP had no idea that they were developing media on-demand, they were making it so that you could transfer bits from one archaic machine to another."
How could they predict iTunes? Why would you think it reasonable to predict the usage of such a filesystem?
I did a yum update the other day for my Fedora Core 1 laptop - and it downloaded a new gdk_pixbuf package that broke VMWare so that I couldn't get it to run.
1) Adding more address space bits doesn't significantly slow down performance.
2) Migrating from one address space to another is painful. Why make it more frequent by aiming low? Do you think migration would be any less painful in 14 years?
3) New applications: Broadband didn't just result in really fast web-page downloads - the entire online music industry stems from that. The original creators of TCP/IP had no idea that they were developing media on-demand, they were making it so that you could transfer bits from one archaic machine to another.
Building flexible, capable systems creates an environment where development isn't as constrained by limitations - resulting in new, unpredictable developments.
Well, your second example rather sucks. But, the first is good, and well appreciated - an idea I hadn't considered well.
I was perhaps mistaken in considering software patents only. What's curious about software patents is that the implementation IS the method, and that is covered already by copyright.
How could software patents work sanely, so that this important distinction is relevant?
I'd be impressed if there's another round of jobs at all. Skills are meaningless. Nothing is valuable to employers except the money grab.
What a worthless pile of crap. It is incredibly difficult to find truly capable, hard-working people who not only understand what they are doing, but are willing to suck up and just get the damn job done.
I've been looking for some time to get rid of some of the work that I do - and it's been a BITCH finding somebody with the right attitude, the right mentality, and the right skillset to replace me.
What a load of SHIT. If you are qualified, if you know what you are doing, you are willing to learn, and you are humble enough to realize that "skilled" doesn't mean "can type and read slashdot" you will have little trouble getting work.
Be good at what you do. Be very, very good. In fact, be the very best. Make sure that what you do is something that people need. Then, find people who need very good people for what you do, and let them know that 1) they need you, and 2) they can have you.
And then, continue to be good at what you do. It will pay and pay big.
Too many people have an entitlement mentality - they figure that because they know X, Y, and Z, that they should be handed money.
That too, is a crock. You are worth whatever value you provide to your employer, whether it be in the form of savings, or in the form of sales. (money in)
If what you do isn't a cost benefit, get ready because your job is in danger.
Provide value to your employer/customer and make sure they are making money on you. Then, your job / position / contract is secure.
Thanks to SCO I have a brand new SUV and some really really nice computer equipment. And I am not even done spending a quarter of the proceeds from my successful SCO short transanction. I would actually like to thank Darl and the gang for the money.
Bzzzzzzzt!
I call bullshit.
You mention an SUV without a model number. You mention "computer equipment" without any specifics. You mention shorting stock, without saying how much, nor do you mention annything that gives any idea how much, other than "a quarter of the proceeds".
I think you're full of it. If what you said was real, you wouldn've given SOME details on such a beneficial transaction!
How much did you invest? When? Where did you go to invest? What was your ROI? How long did you wait? What was the term of the short?
You're obviously in the enviable position of serving a vertical market with little competition, or even a monopoly, which allows you to enforce a relatively Draconian registration scheme (which I admit you do soften with some additional services).
Sorta - but not really. There are numerous competitors, but it IS a vertical market. What skews things a bit is that the marketplace in which we operate is constantly changing. We provide software geared towards compliance with govt regulations - thus, as new regulations come down, we need to update our software and databases to match.
It's a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
By leveraging the "get a certificate" against these ever-changing regulations, we provide an answer that all but guarantees compliance to the administrators who buy our product.
Competition? Yeah. Vertial market? Yeah. Are we stomping the competition with our network-based "draconian" product? Yeah. It's fun!
I think there should be a more general concept of overlayed filesystems, where a FS could be mounted on top of another FS "with transparency", so that you can see all the files in the entire "stack". A standard "ls" would show 1 instance of each file, with the "highest level" FS taking precedence. A modified program might be able to see all the versions of a particular file and be able to copy one to another (if permissions allow).
Well, I'm not sure about your operating system, but this layout is one I commonly use with my ASP-hosted applications.
See, you have a set of default settings, but you want to be able to override the defaults on a customer-by-customer basis - the ideas you espouse work quite well.
Also, you have a weblication made up, and a customer wants to customize sections X, Y, and Z. Well, if you can override the program files called to generate X, Y, and Z (while leaving the rest of the app alone) you hit paydirt.
A concept I've borrowed heavily from is the "which" command, where each customer has their own homee directory. Given a path like "~/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin" you can easily see that by putting files in ~/bin you can override (for example) the "ls" command.
I do something very similar with my weblications to ccustomize them for an individual customer. A VERY powerful idea, no?
We went the route of requiring licenese certificates. Since our business model is subscription-based, we issue software certificates that are good for about one month. (depending on the contract and payment terms)
Getting a certificate is an automated, push-button process - we made it as easy as humanly possible.
But, we didn't stop there. We decided to capitalize on this certificate process, and in fact perform a full backup of the user's database, along with publishing software updates.
Further, we allow them to use their software on any computer or any number of computers. We don't restrict when and where, or on what computers they can install the software, and everywhere the user goes, their data follows.
It's an ASP business model, with a sort of "rent-a-software" hosted application twist. Since we bill by the data size, we really don't care. And the benefits are enormous.
1) Since we keep redundant backups of the users' data, it's not a big deal if the user's computer crashes or is stolen.
2) We get paid for providing quality software.
3) Customers are happy to see software updates when hooking up to backup their data and get a new certificate.
4) Customers love the freedom to work on whatever computer and at whatever location they desire.
Just recently, we had a user in tears on the phone, thanking us for providing this service. Her computer had been thoroughly hosed by a worm, and she lost all her data. 100%, and no backups - months worth of work gone forever. Except for the extensive work she'd done with our software product. Because of the frequent backups obtained with the re-certifying of her software, we had a recent backup of all her stuff on our servers and she was able to recover it automatically!
Product registration is a pain in the 4ss, but you can either hate it, or find some way to make it really worthwhile to the consumer.
The P2P solution either requires users to have their cable modem pegged and nearly unusable for 60 days (80gb is the current best laptop drive size, most cable modems max out at 128kbps up), or that they backup only a fraction of their hard drive.
My home network is on a 1.5 Mbit ADSL line. I backup data remotely using Backup Buddy. (which I wrote, based on rsync)
When i deploy a new server, it typically takes 1-3 days to do the first backup. Once that's done, it takes far, far less than that per night per server to keep everything up. Every morning, it's done. the usual process per server is about 30-45 minutes.
First time sucks. After that, it's much, much more manageable.
Now, there's the remark of horse pucky. WTF?!?!? Sure, I'll use vim to edit my workflow summary! None of this meaningful bullets and shiat - I don't really need to READ that PPT...
Welcome to the real world. People demand data, and they demand it on terms that work with THEIR computer. That means MS Office in most cases. (Which OpenOffice lets me interoperate with with very few hassles)
Killing someone because of trespassing? Someone that's almost surely unarmed!? That's the last solution I would've chosen, if at all.
Then stay the hell out of my house.
My five children are largely the point of my life. If you are in my house, I have the legal right to use deadly force to protect my loved ones, and I will always vote to preserve this protection. I've gotten my hunter's safety course, and I've shot my gun enough times to be quite familiar with how to use it. (somewhere in the range of several hundred rounds over the years - I take it out every other year or so to the range)
You get one warning in my house. The next warning is lethal. Don't like that? Stay out of my house.
Understand that as the homeowner, I have no idea what your purpose is in my house. I don't know what you intend to do. However, it's quite certain that if you're in my house, and you aren't invited, you're not there to water my houseplants.
That already predisposes your presense to hostility, and from there it's only a matter of degree. If you really want some perspective, get married. Buy a house. Raise children in it, and then listen to somebody say that you shouldn't have the right to protect your family.
Wait for the blood to boil, because it will. Oh, and knock when you get to my front door. I'm an awful nice guy when you knock first.
It would be interesting to incorporate the drivers onto the pice of hardware. I mean what if insead of including a CD [that these days are filled with crap] with the hardware, that they just put a small flash memory onto the item, and stored the drivers there.
That was tried, years ago, and was the norm an all early PCs. It was called BIOS then - a low - level program unique to the hardware kept on the hardware itself. You see remnants of that system still - if you try to put a 200 GB HDD into an old Pentium II you'll find BIOS limitations. If you buy an PCI IDE card, it has its own HDD bios that allow the ancient hardware to support the new HDD. (I have an ancient AMD K6/2 with half a terabyte of storage in it thanks to the BIOS on the IDE controller card)
The BIOS system could have been scaled up to handle things to this day - however, Microsoft decided that they had to do some funky things to get Windows 3.x to perform decently, and bypassed the BIOS altogether. Thus, we have two layers of hardware compatability - the BIOS level (which is slowly being phased out) and the O/S level (which has all the CD's and download this-ums, and all that)
How different the world would be if Microsoft had cooperated with the BIOS manufacturers to get a driver system that did what it really should have! Instead, MS did their software driver hack, and by necessity, the world has followed, and here we are in driver hell...
Wouldn't it be nice if you could somehow define a style for function calls?
See, I use Moz on Linux to browse, and usually edit files on the server, with either vi or pico/nano. In Pico, Ctl-W means "find". In Moz, it means "close browser tab".
TALK ABOUT FREAKIN' ANNOYING!
Or how about this one - Ctl-F has no effect in nano, no effect in vi, but means find in most Windows editors.
Or, Ctl-A means beginning of line in nano, but means select-all in OpenOffice. So, I hit Ctl-A and start typing. If I'm in pico, all is well. In Star Office, I've just deleted the entire document and need to use Ctl-Z to get it all back.
AUGHG!
I work in Windows and Linux, in, and out, of X. Program functions are VERY inconsistent and drive me !@#!@##
Slashdot Mirror
Let me get this straight - you read slashdot, but you *arent't* in Mensa?
How horribly disadvantaged you are! How do you ever manage to cope?
Being a member of Mensa is merely the process of passing a stupid test and paying a small fee...
We can't stop people from having kids. We can try and conserve natural resources, but eventually the number of people will be more than the planet can support.
Over-population is not quite the problem you think it is. In the United States, pop growth has slowed to a crawl, and most of our growth is due to immigration.
Developed countries the world over have slow (and declining) birthrates. Heck, Italy is trying to encourage their population to reproduce - they are suffering from net population decrease!
World population, based on current trends, is due to stabilize around 2075 at around 9 million people.
There are a number of reasons for this. Affluent people tend to have fewer kids, merely because they are a hassle. In the more impoverished nations, existing infrastructure is failing to provide for current needs, let alone future growth. For example, one of the largest mass poisonings ever in human history is taking place in Asia because of arsenic-laced drinking water.
<RANT>
What truly amazes me is the sheer number of people who don't google whatever they're talking about before they say it. The volume of uninformed, stupid comments on the Internet that can be corrected with 10 minutes of googling and quick research is mind-boggling.
People with access to this kind of information should not be making the stupid comments they are. That they do, anyway, and don't get flogged on the streets is a mere testament to the fact that humanity does not yet value intelligence and critical thinking over stupidity.
I daresay we are entering a new era of humanity - the era of the informed but ignorant idiot. The information is there - cheap, easily available. Tools that our ancestors would have killed for - and we use it to pass along mundane drivel because "we feel" or "we think" rather than actually use that tool to anywhere near its true potential.
Sad. TV is used for network television and advertising, instead of mass education and information. News shows on TV are remarkably shallow and uninformative. The best bet are the "nature" shows, which are nice but curiously designed towards complacency.
We are in the middle of a mass extinction event brought about, no doubt, by people who chcose not to be informed, and make decisions based on ego and inadequate information.
We need to pay attention, people!
</RANT
I can't claim to know anything at all about the dynamics of Norway, but here in California (you know, it's mighty cold when it's below 50 degrees!) piped natural gas heat is generally cheaper than electricity.
Thus, it's cheaper to use the gas heater than to try to offset the cheap gas heat with expensive electricity.
Well done! You actually had me for a second! Talk about EXCELLENT trolling... it wasn't until I noticed the "uh," did I catch the sarcasm!
I was going to say something like "So, you'd rather sit and wait through 6 hours of downloading torrents than just show up 10 minutes late to the movie?" or "What a crock of crap. I can't believe you'd stoop this low and stand on ground this weak to justify your intent to violate copyrights!".
But, it's funny, see? I wish I had mod points - You'd get a +1 funny from me...
Look, anyone can enter the market (any market). It just requires capital.
This is perhaps the only piece of your post that isn't utterly worthless. But, what happens when the cost of entry is measured in the BILLIONS of dollars? Suddenly, not just "anyone" can enter...
So long as entry is not limited (by laws or other regulations), one company cannot be a monopoly.
What a load of crap. You have no idea what you are writing about.
but once they begin to use their *monopoly* advantage, new companies are born to compete, which drives down the prices again.
And, perhaps you could explain how this is so?
Sherman Anti-trust Act -> pure stupidity. The effects of the ATT breakup are still being felt, and they are nothing good.
I guess you don't remember the days when telephones were not private property and were rented from the telephone company? I guess you don't remember paying $0.45 per minute for a scratchy telephone connection to a nearby town? Or when there were *no* long distance alternatives? Or when it took a month or more to get a phone line installed?
Perhaps changing these things are "nothing good"?
Already, SBC is exerting its near monopoly pressure on California ISPs and broadband providers. If you were even mildly involved (say, with CISPA, California Internet Service Providers Association) you would know this. It's a constant battle that costs consumers many millions anually.
The Internet itself largely stems from govornment regulation forcing the monopoly telecommunications companies (primarily, AT&T) to allow consumers to rent a lease-line! That decision, the mid-70's, was a big deal that the telecommunications companies fought bitterly against.
If that hadn't happened, our beloved Internet would have died on the vine as an irrelevant academic curiosity...
But, I guess you won't let these (and plenty of other) facts get in the way of your (uninformed, naive) opinion...
As father of five kids, with seven people in the house, basic things such as double-paned windows, water-saving shower heads, gas dryer, hot-water blankets, compact flourescent bulbs, and so on have been the mainstay.
If this was not the case, my monthly utility bill (in California) would easily hit $500-$600/mo. As it is, we're lucky to have bills typically in the $200-$300 range. (I have two mini-servers for my business that are never off)
Often, these kinds of things provide clear advantages beyond merely saving money.
Recently, the water-saving shower head in the downstairs bathroom broke, and I screwed on the original shower head, which I still had in the shed, thinking this would "get us by" until I could get in for another one.
Boy, was I wrong! With the old shower head, we could shower everybody in the household, one right after another in about one or two hours, including dressing.
But, with the new shower head, we ran out of hot water within 20 minutes, making showering everybody nearly an all-day venture while we waited for the hot-water heater to catch up.
Once, my son left the shower running hot water all night long, and in the morning, we found the shower going, and there was still plenty of hot water!
Another example: Flourescent bulbs not only use far less energy than incandescent, they also last much longer (who wants to replace light bulbs once a month?) and don't heat up the house.
I noticed the difference when I changed out the three 60-watt bulbs on the living room fam with three 15-watt flourescent! The room was, if anything, brighter, and, previously, when the fan was on low, you could FEEL the heat coming off those three 60-watt bulbs!
Double-paned windows mean that my teen children can blare their punk music as loud as they want to without pissing off the neighbors. Also, we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
Also, in the winter time, you can sit next to the windows and not feel cold. That adds much to my sense of well-being on a cold winter morning...
Embrace conservation. It doesn't *have* to be a hassle!
Its not over priced just because its more then you want to spend. Untill you figure out how basic economics work, there's just no helping you. Or would you be OK with your employer deciding that your services are overpriced so they wont be paying you anymore (but dont stop showing up for work)?
Until you figure out how basic economics work in a monopoly condition, you'll continue spitting out tripe such as this.
The fact is, when a marketplace is in a state of monopoly, the employer can decide to change your wages, and you'd still be forced to show up the next day because you have little/no choice. (borrowing from your example, here)
Free market economics are a fiction. A truly free market (with no restrictions) quickly degrades into a monopolistic market, with one or just a few dominant players that control each industry.
Offsetting this tendency is our government, which has the onerous task of encouraging (and in some cases, enforcing) relatively free, competetive markets to develop.
One of the ways it does this is by limiting the power of monopolies to leverage their unfair advantage to prevent competition in new areas. EG: Sherman Anti-trust Act.
If you hang around here, you'll see phrases like "convicted monopolist" in conjunction with Microsoft. That's because, in the desktop software market, they have a monopoly, and have been found repeatedly abusing that monopoly position to thwart competition in other industries. (EG: The browser marketplace was all but destroyed by Microsoft by leveraging its dominance in the Operating System market)
Do some reading before you spout - you just might learn something!
Dealing with RH's model I think will be a bit harder.
Red Hat has largely marginalized themselves. In aiming for "the enterprise" they largely gave up their biggest promotion base - the grassroots. How many people have switched away from Red Hat in the past year?
Red Hat 7.x, 8, and 9 were awesome - and the support was very good. I could deploy today for free, and expect that if things worked out, I could pay for support later.
But that's no longer the case. I can either deploy with the big, expensive "Advanced" line, or Fedora. There's no upgrade path from Fedora, either.
Consequently, I'm in the middle of migrating about 18 servers away from RedHat - revenue to RH dipped about $1000/year from me - and I've called the company exactly twice for support.
Pretty stupid, if you ask me.
Now, with their Fedora / Advance NNN split, I can no longer consolidate the smaller, embedded servers with the same administration platform as the far busier primary servers - they are different enough that administration costs escalate. And Fedora is annoyingly buggy.
Thus, I'm busy migrating everything to Debian, just for the uniformity and long term consistency of the platform!
Red Hat is busy marginalizing themselves, while Novell has always had the best support in the industry. As long as Novell is reasonable and manages to provide a decent support path for the little guys, too, they are well positioned to make a killing.
I wish them well.
dump email all together [sic] ....
where are the flaws in this reasoning?
1) You aren't a businessman. Don't pretend you are, and certainly don't pretend you know how things should be when running one.
2) Businesses are there to make money. Thus, the cardinal rule of business is... don't say "no" to money. In any form. If you turn away customers by not being available for them, you are, in effect, saying "no" to money.
Show me that it won't result in having to say "Sorry mr. corporate contact..." and you might have something. Otherwise, that noise is just your butt cheeks flapping together pointlessly.
I really think Slashdot updating their HTML would be _much_ harder than what was suggested above. MUUUUUCH harder. I think what was suggested above will happen much sooner.
I think you are probably right. And so does somebody else!
"3) New applications: Broadband didn't just result in really fast web-page downloads - the entire online music industry stems from that. The original creators of TCP/IP had no idea that they were developing media on-demand, they were making it so that you could transfer bits from one archaic machine to another."
How could they predict iTunes? Why would you think it reasonable to predict the usage of such a filesystem?
I did a yum update the other day for my Fedora Core 1 laptop - and it downloaded a new gdk_pixbuf package that broke VMWare so that I couldn't get it to run.
I'd guess this pixbuf is used to draw the widgets in XWindows. Here's a thread on this.
I had to go through some contortions to get yum to retrograde my FC laptop and get VMWare (a show-stopper if not working) going.
Since now there's a *new* vulnerability, I'm waiting until the dust settles and this is reasonably resolved before I try this again.
First time I ever broke something with yum...
1) Adding more address space bits doesn't significantly slow down performance.
2) Migrating from one address space to another is painful. Why make it more frequent by aiming low? Do you think migration would be any less painful in 14 years?
3) New applications: Broadband didn't just result in really fast web-page downloads - the entire online music industry stems from that. The original creators of TCP/IP had no idea that they were developing media on-demand, they were making it so that you could transfer bits from one archaic machine to another.
Building flexible, capable systems creates an environment where development isn't as constrained by limitations - resulting in new, unpredictable developments.
Well, your second example rather sucks. But, the first is good, and well appreciated - an idea I hadn't considered well.
I was perhaps mistaken in considering software patents only. What's curious about software patents is that the implementation IS the method, and that is covered already by copyright.
How could software patents work sanely, so that this important distinction is relevant?
That is why patents describe "A method for blah blah blah" - it's the methods which are patented, not the concept of blah blah blah itself.
A subtle but VERY important difference.
Can you give me ONE example where that "very important difference"... made a difference?
If this "important difference" has never resulted in any difference, how is it important?
I'd be impressed if there's another round of jobs at all. Skills are meaningless. Nothing is valuable to employers except the money grab.
What a worthless pile of crap. It is incredibly difficult to find truly capable, hard-working people who not only understand what they are doing, but are willing to suck up and just get the damn job done.
I've been looking for some time to get rid of some of the work that I do - and it's been a BITCH finding somebody with the right attitude, the right mentality, and the right skillset to replace me.
What a load of SHIT. If you are qualified, if you know what you are doing, you are willing to learn, and you are humble enough to realize that "skilled" doesn't mean "can type and read slashdot" you will have little trouble getting work.
Be good at what you do. Be very, very good. In fact, be the very best. Make sure that what you do is something that people need. Then, find people who need very good people for what you do, and let them know that 1) they need you, and 2) they can have you.
And then, continue to be good at what you do. It will pay and pay big.
Too many people have an entitlement mentality - they figure that because they know X, Y, and Z, that they should be handed money.
That too, is a crock. You are worth whatever value you provide to your employer, whether it be in the form of savings, or in the form of sales. (money in)
If what you do isn't a cost benefit, get ready because your job is in danger.
Provide value to your employer/customer and make sure they are making money on you. Then, your job / position / contract is secure.
Thanks to SCO I have a brand new SUV and some really really nice computer equipment. And I am not even done spending a quarter of the proceeds from my successful SCO short transanction. I would actually like to thank Darl and the gang for the money.
Bzzzzzzzt!
I call bullshit.
You mention an SUV without a model number. You mention "computer equipment" without any specifics. You mention shorting stock, without saying how much, nor do you mention annything that gives any idea how much, other than "a quarter of the proceeds".
I think you're full of it. If what you said was real, you wouldn've given SOME details on such a beneficial transaction!
How much did you invest? When? Where did you go to invest? What was your ROI? How long did you wait? What was the term of the short?
In short, you are full of crap.
You're obviously in the enviable position of serving a vertical market with little competition, or even a monopoly, which allows you to enforce a relatively Draconian registration scheme (which I admit you do soften with some additional services).
Sorta - but not really. There are numerous competitors, but it IS a vertical market. What skews things a bit is that the marketplace in which we operate is constantly changing. We provide software geared towards compliance with govt regulations - thus, as new regulations come down, we need to update our software and databases to match.
It's a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
By leveraging the "get a certificate" against these ever-changing regulations, we provide an answer that all but guarantees compliance to the administrators who buy our product.
Competition? Yeah. Vertial market? Yeah. Are we stomping the competition with our network-based "draconian" product? Yeah. It's fun!
I think there should be a more general concept of overlayed filesystems, where a FS could be mounted on top of another FS "with transparency", so that you can see all the files in the entire "stack". A standard "ls" would show 1 instance of each file, with the "highest level" FS taking precedence. A modified program might be able to see all the versions of a particular file and be able to copy one to another (if permissions allow).
Well, I'm not sure about your operating system, but this layout is one I commonly use with my ASP-hosted applications.
See, you have a set of default settings, but you want to be able to override the defaults on a customer-by-customer basis - the ideas you espouse work quite well.
Also, you have a weblication made up, and a customer wants to customize sections X, Y, and Z. Well, if you can override the program files called to generate X, Y, and Z (while leaving the rest of the app alone) you hit paydirt.
A concept I've borrowed heavily from is the "which" command, where each customer has their own homee directory. Given a path like "~/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin" you can easily see that by putting files in ~/bin you can override (for example) the "ls" command.
I do something very similar with my weblications to ccustomize them for an individual customer. A VERY powerful idea, no?
Funny that, it's 30 years old!
We went the route of requiring licenese certificates. Since our business model is subscription-based, we issue software certificates that are good for about one month. (depending on the contract and payment terms)
Getting a certificate is an automated, push-button process - we made it as easy as humanly possible.
But, we didn't stop there. We decided to capitalize on this certificate process, and in fact perform a full backup of the user's database, along with publishing software updates.
Further, we allow them to use their software on any computer or any number of computers. We don't restrict when and where, or on what computers they can install the software, and everywhere the user goes, their data follows.
It's an ASP business model, with a sort of "rent-a-software" hosted application twist. Since we bill by the data size, we really don't care. And the benefits are enormous.
1) Since we keep redundant backups of the users' data, it's not a big deal if the user's computer crashes or is stolen.
2) We get paid for providing quality software.
3) Customers are happy to see software updates when hooking up to backup their data and get a new certificate.
4) Customers love the freedom to work on whatever computer and at whatever location they desire.
Just recently, we had a user in tears on the phone, thanking us for providing this service. Her computer had been thoroughly hosed by a worm, and she lost all her data. 100%, and no backups - months worth of work gone forever. Except for the extensive work she'd done with our software product. Because of the frequent backups obtained with the re-certifying of her software, we had a recent backup of all her stuff on our servers and she was able to recover it automatically!
Product registration is a pain in the 4ss, but you can either hate it, or find some way to make it really worthwhile to the consumer.
The P2P solution either requires users to have their cable modem pegged and nearly unusable for 60 days (80gb is the current best laptop drive size, most cable modems max out at 128kbps up), or that they backup only a fraction of their hard drive.
My home network is on a 1.5 Mbit ADSL line. I backup data remotely using Backup Buddy. (which I wrote, based on rsync)
When i deploy a new server, it typically takes 1-3 days to do the first backup. Once that's done, it takes far, far less than that per night per server to keep everything up. Every morning, it's done. the usual process per server is about 30-45 minutes.
First time sucks. After that, it's much, much more manageable.
You don't need an office suite anyway
Now, there's the remark of horse pucky. WTF?!?!? Sure, I'll use vim to edit my workflow summary! None of this meaningful bullets and shiat - I don't really need to READ that PPT...
Welcome to the real world. People demand data, and they demand it on terms that work with THEIR computer. That means MS Office in most cases. (Which OpenOffice lets me interoperate with with very few hassles)
Killing someone because of trespassing? Someone that's almost surely unarmed!? That's the last solution I would've chosen, if at all.
Then stay the hell out of my house.
My five children are largely the point of my life. If you are in my house, I have the legal right to use deadly force to protect my loved ones, and I will always vote to preserve this protection. I've gotten my hunter's safety course, and I've shot my gun enough times to be quite familiar with how to use it. (somewhere in the range of several hundred rounds over the years - I take it out every other year or so to the range)
You get one warning in my house. The next warning is lethal. Don't like that? Stay out of my house.
Understand that as the homeowner, I have no idea what your purpose is in my house. I don't know what you intend to do. However, it's quite certain that if you're in my house, and you aren't invited, you're not there to water my houseplants.
That already predisposes your presense to hostility, and from there it's only a matter of degree. If you really want some perspective, get married. Buy a house. Raise children in it, and then listen to somebody say that you shouldn't have the right to protect your family.
Wait for the blood to boil, because it will. Oh, and knock when you get to my front door. I'm an awful nice guy when you knock first.
It would be interesting to incorporate the drivers onto the pice of hardware. I mean what if insead of including a CD [that these days are filled with crap] with the hardware, that they just put a small flash memory onto the item, and stored the drivers there.
That was tried, years ago, and was the norm an all early PCs. It was called BIOS then - a low - level program unique to the hardware kept on the hardware itself. You see remnants of that system still - if you try to put a 200 GB HDD into an old Pentium II you'll find BIOS limitations. If you buy an PCI IDE card, it has its own HDD bios that allow the ancient hardware to support the new HDD. (I have an ancient AMD K6/2 with half a terabyte of storage in it thanks to the BIOS on the IDE controller card)
The BIOS system could have been scaled up to handle things to this day - however, Microsoft decided that they had to do some funky things to get Windows 3.x to perform decently, and bypassed the BIOS altogether. Thus, we have two layers of hardware compatability - the BIOS level (which is slowly being phased out) and the O/S level (which has all the CD's and download this-ums, and all that)
How different the world would be if Microsoft had cooperated with the BIOS manufacturers to get a driver system that did what it really should have! Instead, MS did their software driver hack, and by necessity, the world has followed, and here we are in driver hell...
Wouldn't it be nice if you could somehow define a style for function calls?
See, I use Moz on Linux to browse, and usually edit files on the server, with either vi or pico/nano. In Pico, Ctl-W means "find". In Moz, it means "close browser tab".
TALK ABOUT FREAKIN' ANNOYING!
Or how about this one - Ctl-F has no effect in nano, no effect in vi, but means find in most Windows editors.
Or, Ctl-A means beginning of line in nano, but means select-all in OpenOffice. So, I hit Ctl-A and start typing. If I'm in pico, all is well. In Star Office, I've just deleted the entire document and need to use Ctl-Z to get it all back.
AUGHG!
I work in Windows and Linux, in, and out, of X. Program functions are VERY inconsistent and drive me !@#!@##
My $0.02