As a Windy, I have my own opinion as to why the once-great West Indies have gone from an unstoppable force to an unforgiveable farce in just a handful of years. I'd like to hear your opinion on the matter, since the Aussies have made the same journey in the same timeframe -- albeit in the opposite direction
It's one thing to vary the price with availability, demand and the cost of components. To feed in discounts as the order expands to encompass more items or extras.
Thai is quite different from Amazon. They were essentially using past-purchase information and website activity to determine your ability to pay more (IOW how rich you were) and boosting the price on you based on that.
If the price of RAM goes up, I expect to pay more. If it drops later, I'll groan when my friend gets the exact same machine for less. But that's the way in the industry. OTOH, if I save up and buy an expensive book, I don't want all subsequent purchases to be charged at an inflated price, because I've now proved I can afford it!
According to the letter, the charge is $0.06 per user, which I find quite reasonable...
That's not the point.
I think they may have a right to charge you the 6 cents if you use their service. Yes, they may have obtained the data from us and under false pretenses too, but they are now charging for the service or at least so they claim.
If Google suddenly started charging one cent per search, it would be a charge for the search service, not for the billion web-pages which aren't really Google's property!
The thing is, how can CDDB expect money from someone who ISN'T using their service? It would be like the aforementioned Google suing because you decided not to pay the cent and switch to (say) AltaVista.
It's a darned interesting business-plan. To simply sue everyone who decided they didn't want to be your customer, and chose a competing product!
Given the specification of the X-Box, there isn't much that it couldn't do to satisfy the needs of Joe Normal in Consumerland, particularly with a few choice hardware add-ons.
With it's low price, Microsoft name and 500 million in advertising behind it, couldn't it replace the PC in the majority of homes in the next few years? Then everybody in the world will be using a Microsoft-controlled hardware platform, obviously running Microsoft-controlled software, and the die-hards who insist on a "real" computer will be so far and few between as to not really count.
As for Linux ports to the X-Box, who says there won't be some restrictive licensing that makes such a move illegal? Or clever hardware that makes the box shut down if the monthly Microsoft licence fee isn't paid?
I mean, why is Microsoft getting into hardware all of a sudden? The last time they did that was with the Microsoft Mouse, a move needed to make mice more readily available and their GUI more practical. When these guys build hardware I'm suspicious that they are trying to manipulate the software market!
A new twist on the Indiana Jones-style lone adventurer loner is that they also have a precocious kid...
New twist? C'mon! There was a horrible little "precocious kid" in the second (I think) IJ movie, and there was one in Jurassic park II and in that POS Star Wars: Episode I the precocious kid was the movie...
In fact it's hard to think of a movie that doesn't have a precocious little ten-year-old whippersnapper with a 44-year-old mouth on him. Hollywood seems to be incapable of producing a movie without one, and they are all in need of a serious spanking as well. Not that they are going to get one of course...
Oooh! Jon, you bad little boy! We told you not to press the DETONATE button on that giga-ton warhead... Now look what you've gone and done! Why, it'd be Time Out for you for sure, if it wasn't for the fact that at nine years old you can "hack" into the Pentagon mainframe in four seconds, using a palm-top and seven squiggles of graffiti!
Whereas Source Code and MPEG Audio must never be restricted in any way, shape or form - lest society as we know it collapse, digital images of titties and beavers must never be seen by anyone. Lest society as we know it collapse...
"What happens when a software company from which you lease goes under?
Suppose the company, without going out of business, decides they do not want to support the software any more? Perhaps they have a new version with more features (and a higher price/rental) that they are interested in pushing? Perhaps they merge with a competitor and now have two similar products competing with each other and decide to kill off one of them? Suppose they want everybody to switch to the (buggy?) version 6.0 so they can close down their v5 support department?
There are any number of ways you could have the rented-software rug pulled out from under you. I guess you had better address that issue before signing on for a particular product and structuring your company's survival around it's continued availablilty!
Do 99% of food-eaters check the fine print to see what addatived are being "forced down their throat"? No. Which is why it is more important than ever, that watchdog organizations keep a careful eye on things for us. It is good to have these things brought to light and discussed. In the event that there is no real danger, then fine. But without someone taking the time to check we would never discover the instances of real abuse.
When you have a selfish point or points you want to make (like Failure to protect against piracy:) but don't want to appear selfish, you dream up a list of other points and submit them all. Your selfish points then get hidden in the smokescreen.
Change your real info on those sites to bogus info (preferably to the mailing address of someone you don't like...
I use a unique userid for each company I do business with. If they (or anyone else) starts to spam me at that address, I use the aliases file to redirect the mail back to them. If they continue to spam me, they actually spam their own customer service department. Or sales, or the CEO or whoever's e-mail addy I can find. Or all of the above.
The term "Hacker" originally described a very poor programmer. Someone who developed code "with an axe". But the english language is dynamic, and the meaning of the term changed. A "Hacker" became someone who was gifted.
Now the language morphs again. To the vast majority of people, a "Hacker" is an anti-social, unscrupulous, destructive computer criminal. And if the majority says that's what the word means, then that is what the word means.
2.3 Sprint may revise, modify or discontinue at any time... any terms and conditions in this Agreement.
If they can change the agreement at any time, then the actual contents of the agreement at any particular time are of no consequence. If they suddenly decide they need the right to bone your wife, they will just change the TOS to suit.
I spent about 100 hours auditing our software for potential problems. Then I spent about 10 hours fixing the problems that were identified, along with any other non-Y2K problems that were identified during the audit. Finito!
But the bean-counters demanded that I attend about 1,000 hours worth of meetings where I had to explain again and again and again and again how the entire problem manifested itself. To people who didn't understand the difference between a digit and a number for goodness sake.:-/
Meanwhile, the pointy-hairs spent about a $1,000,000 to upgrade hardware that should have been changed four or five years prior anyway but they did it now since they could blame the expenditure on Y2K.....
And occasionally consultants were flown in from overseas, paid my annual sallary for a single day, just so they could tell me that I need to make sure that the 9th of September, 1999 doesn't cause a problem. I point-blank refused until they could explain how that date was significant, and the couldn't so they went away again, but they took their fee with them....
And there are fooooooools out there that still believe that the hoop-la was justified!
I looked on the amsat site and can't find anything clearly stating what the point is-- is it just to be cool, ie like a deluxe model airplane, or does it have some special mission, purpose, or function?
I suppose you could say the purpose is to expand the boundaries of human knowledge in the art of construction and operation of space-based communication systems. Quite a bit of modern-day space communications technology was developed on amateur platforms. For instance, I think AMSAT were the first to conceive of and build a "mating ring" bird, a technique that is rapidly gaining ground. (AO-40 is such a bird.)
But of course, a communications satellite is also a very cool "deluxe model airplane" too!
I wonder-- will Ariane 5 use anything as ballast? If I wanna send a ham sandwich into space (to be cool) would they do it?
If you think you could construct a ham sandwich to the stringent standards required by ESA, then you should construct one and submit it. Personally I think you would have some difficulty getting it to pass the clean-room standards. Oh, and do you have a vaccuum chamber that you can test it in?
If this attempt had failed miserably, it would have had a similar effect to Challenger, I believe. People would have frozen on the idea of trying to launch another, and they'd sure as hell use it as precident if a person wanted to go to space...
Perhaps.
But AO-40 isn't the first bird to be launched and lost. One of the earlier phase-III birds went into the ocean (along with the primary payload) when the booster had to be destroyed due to a launch-time systems failure. And one of the PacSats (AO-15?) that was part of the "Magnificent Seven" launch went smoothly into orbit and was never heard of again.
The loss of AO-40 would be a terrible blow to the Amateur Satellite community, but I know that construction of the next bird would begin within days.
Well it's easy enough to ask for code. There's lots of code to ask for too! We could ask them to open-source their OS/2 driver database, although there may be NDA's they have to honour that would prevent this from happening 100%. And I for one would like to see the OS/2 WPS ported to Linux as well. Although there are technical difficulties, I'm sure these could be overcome without too much stress. (Are there any legal problems with porting WPS?)
BUT. What I also hope for from a big, muscular company like IBM is their support in the NON-technical areas.
The more IBM talks Linux in the corporate arena, the greater the likelyhood of it being accepted by the pointy-hairs. And that would be of great benefit to the Linux community at large.
And I keep hearing about some smart-assed lawyer mounting a challenge to the (L)GLP. Frankly, I'd feel much happier if IBM footed the bill for the defense against such an attack, than if I was waiting for Linus to pay for it...
Sure, I want to see the code, but I also want the exposure and, if necessary, the protection!
OpenBSD is the most secure OS on the planet, FreeBSD outperforms linux and has a more stable filesystem, and NetBSD is portable beyond belief. So the question is, why does linux get the spotlight?
Yeah!! An' Betamax is better than VHS! But why does lin^H^H^H VHS get the spotlight? There's bound to be a sane and logical answer to this question too!
A backup flight computer without a watchdog timer?
I believe there is a watchdog timer. It triggers if there is no traffic on the telecommand receiver(s) for ten orbits. Since it's a deep-space bird, AO40 has a long orbital period (mean motion 1.268-ish orbits/day). The watchdog timer will not time out for nearly eight days.
de Gus 8P6SM (formerly active on AO10, AO13, AO16, FO20, KO23, AO27)
This made me curious as to the major storage medium being used in space?
RAM-disks are common. Cosmic rays and gamma particles cause single-bit errors every few hours, which is why they use 11-bit RAM for EEC and run a software program that "washes" the RAM continually. I don't think this is what they mean when they say...its RAM corrupted every 1 or 2 days in orbit as it crosses radiation belts... because this single-bit error mode is common and expected. I'm not really current but I don't think any Amateur birds fly with hard disks on board...
Is heavy shielding a solution for this?
Heavy is not a good word when you are trying to get something into orbit!:)
de Gus 8P6SM (formerly active on AO10, AO13, AO16, FO20, KO23, AO27)
Ask NASA, other space agency or people in university labs that research this stuff about proper radiation shielding for processors?
Actually, NASA and most other space agencies utilize data collected on Amateur satellites. IOW, a lot of the research comes from the Amateur community.
A Ham satellite might launch with five different types of RAM, each hardened using five different new techniques. The hardened RAM might be donated by various agencies. They get to test their RAM-hardening techniques cheap. The Amateur community gets free space-hardened RAM in exchange for the risk posed by using something not quite tried-and-true.
I, too, wish them luck. I might even blow the dust off my IC-970H and 22C/40CX!
de Gus 8P6SM (formerly active on AO10, AO13, AO16, FO20, KO23, AO27)
Slashdot Mirror
As a Windy, I have my own opinion as to why the once-great West Indies have gone from an unstoppable force to an unforgiveable farce in just a handful of years. I'd like to hear your opinion on the matter, since the Aussies have made the same journey in the same timeframe -- albeit in the opposite direction
Care to voice an opinion?
Angus,
Barbados
The big shock to me is that there are fools out there big enough to believe that there was even a vague possibility the advertising was honest!
It's one thing to vary the price with availability, demand and the cost of components. To feed in discounts as the order expands to encompass more items or extras.
Thai is quite different from Amazon. They were essentially using past-purchase information and website activity to determine your ability to pay more (IOW how rich you were) and boosting the price on you based on that.
If the price of RAM goes up, I expect to pay more. If it drops later, I'll groan when my friend gets the exact same machine for less. But that's the way in the industry. OTOH, if I save up and buy an expensive book, I don't want all subsequent purchases to be charged at an inflated price, because I've now proved I can afford it!
According to the letter, the charge is $0.06 per user, which I find quite reasonable...
That's not the point.
I think they may have a right to charge you the 6 cents if you use their service. Yes, they may have obtained the data from us and under false pretenses too, but they are now charging for the service or at least so they claim.
If Google suddenly started charging one cent per search, it would be a charge for the search service, not for the billion web-pages which aren't really Google's property!
The thing is, how can CDDB expect money from someone who ISN'T using their service? It would be like the aforementioned Google suing because you decided not to pay the cent and switch to (say) AltaVista.
It's a darned interesting business-plan. To simply sue everyone who decided they didn't want to be your customer, and chose a competing product!
Given the specification of the X-Box, there isn't much that it couldn't do to satisfy the needs of Joe Normal in Consumerland, particularly with a few choice hardware add-ons.
With it's low price, Microsoft name and 500 million in advertising behind it, couldn't it replace the PC in the majority of homes in the next few years? Then everybody in the world will be using a Microsoft-controlled hardware platform, obviously running Microsoft-controlled software, and the die-hards who insist on a "real" computer will be so far and few between as to not really count.
As for Linux ports to the X-Box, who says there won't be some restrictive licensing that makes such a move illegal? Or clever hardware that makes the box shut down if the monthly Microsoft licence fee isn't paid?
I mean, why is Microsoft getting into hardware all of a sudden? The last time they did that was with the Microsoft Mouse, a move needed to make mice more readily available and their GUI more practical. When these guys build hardware I'm suspicious that they are trying to manipulate the software market!
</paranoia>
New twist? C'mon! There was a horrible little "precocious kid" in the second (I think) IJ movie, and there was one in Jurassic park II and in that POS Star Wars: Episode I the precocious kid was the movie...
In fact it's hard to think of a movie that doesn't have a precocious little ten-year-old whippersnapper with a 44-year-old mouth on him. Hollywood seems to be incapable of producing a movie without one, and they are all in need of a serious spanking as well. Not that they are going to get one of course...
Sheesh!
Whereas Source Code and MPEG Audio must never be restricted in any way, shape or form - lest society as we know it collapse, digital images of titties and beavers must never be seen by anyone. Lest society as we know it collapse...
Hands up if you're a hypocrite!
"What happens when a software company from which you lease goes under?
Suppose the company, without going out of business, decides they do not want to support the software any more? Perhaps they have a new version with more features (and a higher price/rental) that they are interested in pushing? Perhaps they merge with a competitor and now have two similar products competing with each other and decide to kill off one of them? Suppose they want everybody to switch to the (buggy?) version 6.0 so they can close down their v5 support department?
There are any number of ways you could have the rented-software rug pulled out from under you. I guess you had better address that issue before signing on for a particular product and structuring your company's survival around it's continued availablilty!
Do 99% of food-eaters check the fine print to see what addatived are being "forced down their throat"? No. Which is why it is more important than ever, that watchdog organizations keep a careful eye on things for us. It is good to have these things brought to light and discussed. In the event that there is no real danger, then fine. But without someone taking the time to check we would never discover the instances of real abuse.
"My own group will attempt to broadcast a powerful
long term signal using only a small satellite."
Great. Interminable orbital QRM thanks to a buncha adolescents with more money than sense.
At 10cm^3 it's probably just too small for a Bonsai Kitten!
There have been 101 shuttle launches.
You're thinking about Dalmatians!
It is a common ploy.
When you have a selfish point or points you want to make (like Failure to protect against piracy: ) but don't want to appear selfish, you dream up a list of other points and submit them all. Your selfish points then get hidden in the smokescreen.
It is better to to have /etc/init.d/love start and kill -9 start than to never have /etc/init.d/love start
Don't you mean kill -9 love ?
Change your real info on those sites to bogus info (preferably to the mailing address of someone you don't like...
I use a unique userid for each company I do business with. If they (or anyone else) starts to spam me at that address, I use the aliases file to redirect the mail back to them. If they continue to spam me, they actually spam their own customer service department. Or sales, or the CEO or whoever's e-mail addy I can find. Or all of the above.
The term "Hacker" originally described a very poor programmer. Someone who developed code "with an axe". But the english language is dynamic, and the meaning of the term changed. A "Hacker" became someone who was gifted.
Now the language morphs again. To the vast majority of people, a "Hacker" is an anti-social, unscrupulous, destructive computer criminal. And if the majority says that's what the word means, then that is what the word means.
Get over it.
2.3 Sprint may revise, modify or discontinue at any time ... any terms and conditions in this Agreement.
If they can change the agreement at any time, then the actual contents of the agreement at any particular time are of no consequence. If they suddenly decide they need the right to bone your wife, they will just change the TOS to suit.
I spent about 100 hours auditing our software for potential problems. Then I spent about 10 hours fixing the problems that were identified, along with any other non-Y2K problems that were identified during the audit. Finito!
:-/
But the bean-counters demanded that I attend about 1,000 hours worth of meetings where I had to explain again and again and again and again how the entire problem manifested itself. To people who didn't understand the difference between a digit and a number for goodness sake.
Meanwhile, the pointy-hairs spent about a $1,000,000 to upgrade hardware that should have been changed four or five years prior anyway but they did it now since they could blame the expenditure on Y2K.....
And occasionally consultants were flown in from overseas, paid my annual sallary for a single day, just so they could tell me that I need to make sure that the 9th of September, 1999 doesn't cause a problem. I point-blank refused until they could explain how that date was significant, and the couldn't so they went away again, but they took their fee with them....
And there are fooooooools out there that still believe that the hoop-la was justified!
I looked on the amsat site and can't find anything clearly stating what the point is-- is it just to be cool, ie like a deluxe model airplane, or does it have some special mission, purpose, or function?
I suppose you could say the purpose is to expand the boundaries of human knowledge in the art of construction and operation of space-based communication systems. Quite a bit of modern-day space communications technology was developed on amateur platforms. For instance, I think AMSAT were the first to conceive of and build a "mating ring" bird, a technique that is rapidly gaining ground. (AO-40 is such a bird.)
But of course, a communications satellite is also a very cool "deluxe model airplane" too!
I wonder-- will Ariane 5 use anything as ballast? If I wanna send a ham sandwich into space (to be cool) would they do it?
If you think you could construct a ham sandwich to the stringent standards required by ESA, then you should construct one and submit it. Personally I think you would have some difficulty getting it to pass the clean-room standards. Oh, and do you have a vaccuum chamber that you can test it in?
If this attempt had failed miserably, it would have had a similar effect to Challenger, I believe. People would have frozen on the idea of trying to launch another, and they'd sure as hell use it as precident if a person wanted to go to space...
Perhaps.
But AO-40 isn't the first bird to be launched and lost. One of the earlier phase-III birds went into the ocean (along with the primary payload) when the booster had to be destroyed due to a launch-time systems failure. And one of the PacSats (AO-15?) that was part of the "Magnificent Seven" launch went smoothly into orbit and was never heard of again.
The loss of AO-40 would be a terrible blow to the Amateur Satellite community, but I know that construction of the next bird would begin within days.
73, de Gus 8P6SM (Eight Papa Six Sly Mongoose)
What do we want IBM to give us?
Well it's easy enough to ask for code. There's lots of code to ask for too! We could ask them to open-source their OS/2 driver database, although there may be NDA's they have to honour that would prevent this from happening 100%. And I for one would like to see the OS/2 WPS ported to Linux as well. Although there are technical difficulties, I'm sure these could be overcome without too much stress. (Are there any legal problems with porting WPS?)
BUT. What I also hope for from a big, muscular company like IBM is their support in the NON-technical areas.
The more IBM talks Linux in the corporate arena, the greater the likelyhood of it being accepted by the pointy-hairs. And that would be of great benefit to the Linux community at large.
And I keep hearing about some smart-assed lawyer mounting a challenge to the (L)GLP. Frankly, I'd feel much happier if IBM footed the bill for the defense against such an attack, than if I was waiting for Linus to pay for it...
Sure, I want to see the code, but I also want the exposure and, if necessary, the protection!
OpenBSD is the most secure OS on the planet, FreeBSD outperforms linux and has a more stable filesystem, and NetBSD is portable beyond belief. So the question is, why does linux get the spotlight?
Yeah!! An' Betamax is better than VHS! But why does lin^H^H^H VHS get the spotlight? There's bound to be a sane and logical answer to this question too!
A backup flight computer without a watchdog timer?
I believe there is a watchdog timer. It triggers if there is no traffic on the telecommand receiver(s) for ten orbits. Since it's a deep-space bird, AO40 has a long orbital period (mean motion 1.268-ish orbits/day). The watchdog timer will not time out for nearly eight days.
de Gus 8P6SM (formerly active on AO10, AO13, AO16, FO20, KO23, AO27)
This made me curious as to the major storage medium being used in space?
...its RAM corrupted every 1 or 2 days in orbit as it crosses radiation belts... because this single-bit error mode is common and expected. I'm not really current but I don't think any Amateur birds fly with hard disks on board...
:)
RAM-disks are common. Cosmic rays and gamma particles cause single-bit errors every few hours, which is why they use 11-bit RAM for EEC and run a software program that "washes" the RAM continually. I don't think this is what they mean when they say
Is heavy shielding a solution for this?
Heavy is not a good word when you are trying to get something into orbit!
de Gus 8P6SM (formerly active on AO10, AO13, AO16, FO20, KO23, AO27)
Ask NASA, other space agency or people in university labs that research this stuff about proper radiation shielding for processors?
Actually, NASA and most other space agencies utilize data collected on Amateur satellites. IOW, a lot of the research comes from the Amateur community.
A Ham satellite might launch with five different types of RAM, each hardened using five different new techniques. The hardened RAM might be donated by various agencies. They get to test their RAM-hardening techniques cheap. The Amateur community gets free space-hardened RAM in exchange for the risk posed by using something not quite tried-and-true.
I, too, wish them luck. I might even blow the dust off my IC-970H and 22C/40CX!
de Gus 8P6SM (formerly active on AO10, AO13, AO16, FO20, KO23, AO27)