I don't see how this counts as "buying" the competition. BSDi wasn't in the hardware business before.:)
Re:Rapid growth vs. rapid employment...
on
TurboLinux Layoffs
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· Score: 2
Go ahead, then. Name real research that came out of microsoft. Not reimplementations, but genuine new ideas. e.g., patching Kerberos to make it incompatible doesn't qualify as "research". It has to be real *progress*. I haven't seen anything they've done that wasn't done elsewhere first. They may have been the first to mass-produce a given thing, but that's not research, that's monopoly power.
Re:Rapid growth vs. rapid employment...
on
TurboLinux Layoffs
·
· Score: 2
Hey, there's lots of work to be done in the techie industry. Microsoft laying people off would mean that some of them would get jobs doing something productive.;)
That's why I picked them in particular; no useful research comes out of Microsoft.
I think a lot of companies have had problems where employment growth outpaced revenue growth. At Comdex, a lot of booths were fairly empty during much of the show; this, in my opinion, means the booth was too large.
I hope TurboLinux makes it; it's the first Linux distro I've seen that worked "correctly" for me on the very first try, and it seemed quite polished. A lot of work went into this distribution; I hope they keep it up.
Oh, well. Just think, someday the headline will be about Microsoft cutting jobs...
How about the speed of, say, the particles in metal, which also conducts sound fairly well?
Still, if you look at movement on a larger scale, no one particle moves in the same direction as the wave, anywhere near as fast as the wave, for the entire length of the wave. They all bounce around, and many of them aren't even going in the right direction.
This is Gateway, the company which, confronted with allegations of spam, said "our legal team is pretty sure that what we're doing is not illegal".
Doesn't that fill you with confidence in how they'll handle privacy issues?
(Anyway, given that Gateway was the only company whose sales reps outright laughed at me, and made fun of me for asking about non-Windows systems, when I was last looking for a laptop, I have trouble believing they're serious.)
On the other hand, nothing ever moved faster than light. So far as I can tell, when sound moves at Mach 1 (or so), it's not because your mouth emits particles that are moving at mach 1 and they reach the other person still moving at mach 1. The wave moves faster than the particles involved at any given time.
I just don't buy it. Originally, there may have been a trend towards older programmers being the people who came to it late. Now, you can see programmers in their 50's who learned to program in their early 20's, and programmers in their 40's who were programming as kids.
Guess what! They're not so bad. Honestly, I've met very few people who *don't* get substantially better with age.
I think it's just a myth. Ignore it, play with computers whenever you feel like it, and it'll just get better.
:)
For a frame of reference, about seven years ago, I was overjoyed to get a bad-paying contract position with no benefits and crappy work environment. Now, I'm getting reasonable pay, 3 weeks of vacation, full bennies, stock options, full telecommute, bonuses, company-bought computers to play on, and mildly flexible hours. To make it even cooler, this is where I got sticking with my committment to low-stress work.
When I got out of college, I did a programming project for $8/hour. Now I typically charge $100/hour, and I'm not exactly marketing this, I just do it for recreation.
Now, compare this with, say, RMS, who was last seen north of $200/hour. Or ESR's famous millions.:) This industry has *PLENTY* of room for people to get better paid with age and experience. All you have to do is keep learning, and you'll find it quite easy to stay active.
Not running existing software is a problem *FOR MICROSOFT*. Microsoft has never, ever, competed effectively without network effects. Not once. Every time they've sold products, it's been because they worked with other products that were already out there. Once the PC shipped with DOS, they were set; they just kept shipping things that ran DOS software, and started selling things bundled with the OS, and it went from there.
As to the stability thing, the same argument would imply that WinCE PDA's would be very stable, but they aren't. They're unstable and bloated. The "variety of hardware" thing is a traditional Microsoft excuse. Ever wonder why Linux systems with a variety of hardware don't crash all the time?
So? Paper money has pretty much no *intrinsic* value. We make rules, and people spend money and time doing things *based on the assumption that we all follow those rules*.
So, the mere fact that we have created such rights means that it can meaningfully be said to do damage to someone if we violate those rights.
Now, as to the "natural" thing, well, it's not clear that such rights "naturally" exist, any more than the right to breathe, or the right to eat, or the right to not be raped. All of these are also socially constructed rights. Now, those are rights a lot more people will agree to, but never forget that we invented them out of whole cloth.
Do you think it's fair to expect some control over the use of your creations? Maybe, or maybe not. I think that creators should have that right, because it's a fair exchange for the rest of us to give up. The *possibility* that I can obtain permission to use a creative work is better than what I have if it's never been created. So, I'm never *losing* anything by respecting people's decisions.
Anyway, if copyright is a bad idea, the GPL is a joke. Just remember to apply the same arguments, whether it's a record company trying to charge you $17.00 for a $.15 piece of plastic, or a megacorp that's decided to "share" a closed-source binary release of gcc.
Well, "some time ago" doesn't preclude you having been hit by the last big change-over. Keep in mind, there *was* no telemarketing preference last year...
The problems aren't quite universal, but the majority of people I know who use eBay have had similar experiences. I know about five or six people who complained to either TRUSTe or the BBB Online. (Which, given the deafening silence, tells you how sincere those agencies are.)
This is "hype for gamers", and it's hype from a company that has lied about every single product they've released in living memory.
The X-box will suck. It will be late. It will be unstable - remember who's building it. It will have resource shortage problems.
Most importantly, unless it really is a Windows 98 PC, it will not run existing software, and *BAM*, it's totally, utterly, irrelevant.
Every Microsoft product that has done well has done well by being bundled with a product that's already doing well, or by being compatible with stuff you already have. They don't have that this time, and that makes it pretty much irrelevant to the gaming community.
No network effect means that quality matters, and I just don't see Microsoft being able to produce a *good* platform. "It crashes every so often and you have to reboot" isn't going to go over as well with console game players as it does with office workers who have never used a stable computer in their lives.
I don't think slashdot should be dignifying this box with coverage.
Well, I got an ad. So I complained. They admitted that they were sending ads to people who hadn't asked for them. I complained more. They declared that actually, the message sent "by their marketing department" had been administrative, and said I could always cancel. I did, indeed, send my email to "decline@ebay.com" to refuse the new privacy policy (last October, they changed it, WITHOUT any real notification). They spammed me again later.
They said they primarily target people who aren't visiting the site very often for marketing. But you might want to go see what your "permissions" page says; I know a lot of people who discovered that, during one of the recent changes, they'd been opted-back-in to email, even if they were previously opted out, and everyone I know who had an account to check was mysteriously "opted in" to telemarketing.
After they decided that email inviting you to visit their site more often was "administrative", and changed their privacy policy to make it look like everyone had asked to receive email, phone calls, and other contact, I don't think anyone should have expected better of them.
eBay spams. eBay lies. eBay lies about spam, eBay lies about abuse in general.
eBay does not accept complaints about usenet spam or junk email unless the complaints come from registered users - and you can't be registered without giving them, in their opinion, blanket permission to send any email they wish to describe as administrative.
Even if you cancel your account, you may get additional email; I certainly did, as did a number of other people I know.
First off, that sure sounds like they mean megabits, not megabytes.
Anyway, I think this story is patent bullshit. RAM prices do not increase over time, except for brief spikes. In general, given a time T, at T+6 months, RAM will cost less. Maybe not always, but pretty often.
Every time there's a glut, even a brief one, more people decide to play. There are plenty of companies that can make chips; if prices start getting high, more of them come in.
Might RAM prices go up for a little while? Sure. I don't expect them to stay up, and I don't think people should worry much. They're still going to be cheap compared to a while back...
My guess is that they meant 64Mb, because 64Mb for $6 would be 64MB for around $48, which is much more plausible than believing that consumers are paying a 1200% markup.
I want to know what they're going to do to prevent people from making nearly-compatible files. Seattle Filmworks has a "special, proprietary" format which is really just JPEG with different headers, apparently; there's a program to convert them (sfwjpg), but they deny this, and want you to use special, crappy, Windows/Mac software.
I'd sure hope the new one has some kind of teeth designed to bite anyone trying crap like that.
Copyright is a kind of property, called "intellectual property". However, it has all the attributes of normal property. Having copyright is useful; if you lose copyright, you lose something that had potential monetary value to you.
The thing-protected isn't the property; the copyright itself is, and when you bypass copyright, you do indeed take away a thing someone had, which had value to that person.
Copyright is an outgrowth of the things that made the digital age possible; it is not clear that it is suddenly "obsolete" just because copying is even easier. The purpose of copyright is to provide creators with a way to get paid for work *even though it is easy to copy*. This is why nothing similar to copyright existed before the printing press. As it becomes easier to copy things, we need to find better ways to protect the interests of creators, or we will end up with very few of them.
I'm not real impressed with this Seagram guy's attitude, but his points are *not* invalid because of the digital age; if anything, copyright only makes *sense* because of digital media.
Yeah, "do it for the love of music". That means no full-time efforts on producing albums. Crappy recordings because you can't afford studio time. Using lower-quality equipment so you can't get the sound you really wanted.
Imagine if you couldn't get paid for programming, so you were stuck using a 386 laptop running Windows 3.1, but you did it because you "loved programming". An improvement? I don't think so.
Get real; professional musicians are a good thing in terms of availability of music.
Oh, we certainly can deny a meaning of a word! Look at "hacker", aka "script kiddie", which I still find deeply offensive. I'm learning to live with it, I guess, but it still pisses me off.
Mostly, I'm offended because RMS acts like it's some horrible sin for people to want to place terms on sharing their stuff, but still expects them to follow the GPL. You can't have it both ways; either "sharing" is actually "piracy", or the GPL is actually a joke.
Now, I know that Stallman doesn't, in fact, endorse unauthorized copying. He's attempting to use the word "sharing" because it creates positive connotations, and helps people think about how the world would be if all copying were authorized. I agree, it's an interesting vision. Unfortunately, in the world we *actually* live in, it's essentially an invitation to the ethically-challenged to go steal things.
"Property" is a creation of society. We have a list of things you can own.
When you copy something, you deprive them of something that we put on the list. Don't like this? Go change the rules.
Anyway, the fact is, people who "wouldn't really have bought it anyway" are the exception, and a very rare exception. Mostly, it's just a little lie to cover up theft.
(I once got a program without paying for it, because it was clear I would never buy it. The local autocad distributor gave me a full copy of Autocad when I was about 10, because I enjoyed playing with the demo. Note: He gave. That's okay. Taking isn't the same as giving.)
Note that he, too, is using a term solely for propaganda value. "Sharing" something you don't own isn't generally viewed in very positive terms.
Would Mr. Stallman be happy to learn that a major company was "sharing" a binary-only version of gcc which they had made substantial enhancements to? After all, we all know *sharing* can never be *wrong*.
RMS is a great guy, but never forget that he's just as much into propaganda as anyone else, and arguably moreso than most.
In many parts of the world, anyway, birth rate varies inversely with female literacy. Maybe not totally, but even getting a few people to slow down on the kids will help immensely in some areas, and the second-order effects (kids who got more attention and education when growing up will be even better off...) can start really making a difference.
Me, I'm too lazy, and too attached to my comfortable way of life. I'll stick to less direct contributions for now.
However, a friend of mine has been griping about how she wants to do some good in the world, not just sit at a desk, and I forwarded the article to her.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how this counts as "buying" the competition. BSDi wasn't in the hardware business before. :)
Go ahead, then. Name real research that came out of microsoft. Not reimplementations, but genuine new ideas. e.g., patching Kerberos to make it incompatible doesn't qualify as "research". It has to be real *progress*. I haven't seen anything they've done that wasn't done elsewhere first. They may have been the first to mass-produce a given thing, but that's not research, that's monopoly power.
Hey, there's lots of work to be done in the techie industry. Microsoft laying people off would mean that some of them would get jobs doing something productive. ;)
That's why I picked them in particular; no useful research comes out of Microsoft.
I think a lot of companies have had problems where employment growth outpaced revenue growth. At Comdex, a lot of booths were fairly empty during much of the show; this, in my opinion, means the booth was too large.
I hope TurboLinux makes it; it's the first Linux distro I've seen that worked "correctly" for me on the very first try, and it seemed quite polished. A lot of work went into this distribution; I hope they keep it up.
Oh, well. Just think, someday the headline will be about Microsoft cutting jobs...
How about the speed of, say, the particles in metal, which also conducts sound fairly well?
Still, if you look at movement on a larger scale, no one particle moves in the same direction as the wave, anywhere near as fast as the wave, for the entire length of the wave. They all bounce around, and many of them aren't even going in the right direction.
This is Gateway, the company which, confronted with allegations of spam, said "our legal team is pretty sure that what we're doing is not illegal".
Doesn't that fill you with confidence in how they'll handle privacy issues?
(Anyway, given that Gateway was the only company whose sales reps outright laughed at me, and made fun of me for asking about non-Windows systems, when I was last looking for a laptop, I have trouble believing they're serious.)
On the other hand, nothing ever moved faster than light. So far as I can tell, when sound moves at Mach 1 (or so), it's not because your mouth emits particles that are moving at mach 1 and they reach the other person still moving at mach 1. The wave moves faster than the particles involved at any given time.
Patterns aren't things.
I just don't buy it. Originally, there may have been a trend towards older programmers being the people who came to it late. Now, you can see programmers in their 50's who learned to program in their early 20's, and programmers in their 40's who were programming as kids.
:) This industry has *PLENTY* of room for people to get better paid with age and experience. All you have to do is keep learning, and you'll find it quite easy to stay active.
Guess what! They're not so bad. Honestly, I've met very few people who *don't* get substantially better with age.
I think it's just a myth. Ignore it, play with computers whenever you feel like it, and it'll just get better.
:)
For a frame of reference, about seven years ago, I was overjoyed to get a bad-paying contract position with no benefits and crappy work environment. Now, I'm getting reasonable pay, 3 weeks of vacation, full bennies, stock options, full telecommute, bonuses, company-bought computers to play on, and mildly flexible hours. To make it even cooler, this is where I got sticking with my committment to low-stress work.
When I got out of college, I did a programming project for $8/hour. Now I typically charge $100/hour, and I'm not exactly marketing this, I just do it for recreation.
Now, compare this with, say, RMS, who was last seen north of $200/hour. Or ESR's famous millions.
Not running existing software is a problem *FOR MICROSOFT*. Microsoft has never, ever, competed effectively without network effects. Not once. Every time they've sold products, it's been because they worked with other products that were already out there. Once the PC shipped with DOS, they were set; they just kept shipping things that ran DOS software, and started selling things bundled with the OS, and it went from there.
As to the stability thing, the same argument would imply that WinCE PDA's would be very stable, but they aren't. They're unstable and bloated. The "variety of hardware" thing is a traditional Microsoft excuse. Ever wonder why Linux systems with a variety of hardware don't crash all the time?
Without network effects, Microsoft is a joke.
So? Paper money has pretty much no *intrinsic* value. We make rules, and people spend money and time doing things *based on the assumption that we all follow those rules*.
So, the mere fact that we have created such rights means that it can meaningfully be said to do damage to someone if we violate those rights.
Now, as to the "natural" thing, well, it's not clear that such rights "naturally" exist, any more than the right to breathe, or the right to eat, or the right to not be raped. All of these are also socially constructed rights. Now, those are rights a lot more people will agree to, but never forget that we invented them out of whole cloth.
Do you think it's fair to expect some control over the use of your creations? Maybe, or maybe not. I think that creators should have that right, because it's a fair exchange for the rest of us to give up. The *possibility* that I can obtain permission to use a creative work is better than what I have if it's never been created. So, I'm never *losing* anything by respecting people's decisions.
Anyway, if copyright is a bad idea, the GPL is a joke. Just remember to apply the same arguments, whether it's a record company trying to charge you $17.00 for a $.15 piece of plastic, or a megacorp that's decided to "share" a closed-source binary release of gcc.
Well, "some time ago" doesn't preclude you having been hit by the last big change-over. Keep in mind, there *was* no telemarketing preference last year...
The problems aren't quite universal, but the majority of people I know who use eBay have had similar experiences. I know about five or six people who complained to either TRUSTe or the BBB Online. (Which, given the deafening silence, tells you how sincere those agencies are.)
This is "hype for gamers", and it's hype from a company that has lied about every single product they've released in living memory.
The X-box will suck. It will be late. It will be unstable - remember who's building it. It will have resource shortage problems.
Most importantly, unless it really is a Windows 98 PC, it will not run existing software, and *BAM*, it's totally, utterly, irrelevant.
Every Microsoft product that has done well has done well by being bundled with a product that's already doing well, or by being compatible with stuff you already have. They don't have that this time, and that makes it pretty much irrelevant to the gaming community.
No network effect means that quality matters, and I just don't see Microsoft being able to produce a *good* platform. "It crashes every so often and you have to reboot" isn't going to go over as well with console game players as it does with office workers who have never used a stable computer in their lives.
I don't think slashdot should be dignifying this box with coverage.
Don't bother with the FTC. Send spams like this to rbl@mail-abuse.org, and see how that goes. :)
Well, I got an ad. So I complained. They admitted that they were sending ads to people who hadn't asked for them. I complained more. They declared that actually, the message sent "by their marketing department" had been administrative, and said I could always cancel. I did, indeed, send my email to "decline@ebay.com" to refuse the new privacy policy (last October, they changed it, WITHOUT any real notification). They spammed me again later.
They said they primarily target people who aren't visiting the site very often for marketing. But you might want to go see what your "permissions" page says; I know a lot of people who discovered that, during one of the recent changes, they'd been opted-back-in to email, even if they were previously opted out, and everyone I know who had an account to check was mysteriously "opted in" to telemarketing.
After they decided that email inviting you to visit their site more often was "administrative", and changed their privacy policy to make it look like everyone had asked to receive email, phone calls, and other contact, I don't think anyone should have expected better of them.
eBay spams. eBay lies. eBay lies about spam, eBay lies about abuse in general.
eBay does not accept complaints about usenet spam or junk email unless the complaints come from registered users - and you can't be registered without giving them, in their opinion, blanket permission to send any email they wish to describe as administrative.
Even if you cancel your account, you may get additional email; I certainly did, as did a number of other people I know.
In other words, no surprise; scum is scum.
First off, that sure sounds like they mean megabits, not megabytes.
Anyway, I think this story is patent bullshit. RAM prices do not increase over time, except for brief spikes. In general, given a time T, at T+6 months, RAM will cost less. Maybe not always, but pretty often.
Every time there's a glut, even a brief one, more people decide to play. There are plenty of companies that can make chips; if prices start getting high, more of them come in.
Might RAM prices go up for a little while? Sure. I don't expect them to stay up, and I don't think people should worry much. They're still going to be cheap compared to a while back...
My guess is that they meant 64Mb, because 64Mb for $6 would be 64MB for around $48, which is much more plausible than believing that consumers are paying a 1200% markup.
I want to know what they're going to do to prevent people from making nearly-compatible files. Seattle Filmworks has a "special, proprietary" format which is really just JPEG with different headers, apparently; there's a program to convert them (sfwjpg), but they deny this, and want you to use special, crappy, Windows/Mac software.
I'd sure hope the new one has some kind of teeth designed to bite anyone trying crap like that.
Copyright is a kind of property, called "intellectual property". However, it has all the attributes of normal property. Having copyright is useful; if you lose copyright, you lose something that had potential monetary value to you.
The thing-protected isn't the property; the copyright itself is, and when you bypass copyright, you do indeed take away a thing someone had, which had value to that person.
Copyright is an outgrowth of the things that made the digital age possible; it is not clear that it is suddenly "obsolete" just because copying is even easier. The purpose of copyright is to provide creators with a way to get paid for work *even though it is easy to copy*. This is why nothing similar to copyright existed before the printing press. As it becomes easier to copy things, we need to find better ways to protect the interests of creators, or we will end up with very few of them.
I'm not real impressed with this Seagram guy's attitude, but his points are *not* invalid because of the digital age; if anything, copyright only makes *sense* because of digital media.
Yeah, "do it for the love of music". That means no full-time efforts on producing albums. Crappy recordings because you can't afford studio time. Using lower-quality equipment so you can't get the sound you really wanted.
Imagine if you couldn't get paid for programming, so you were stuck using a 386 laptop running Windows 3.1, but you did it because you "loved programming". An improvement? I don't think so.
Get real; professional musicians are a good thing in terms of availability of music.
Oh, we certainly can deny a meaning of a word! Look at "hacker", aka "script kiddie", which I still find deeply offensive. I'm learning to live with it, I guess, but it still pisses me off.
Mostly, I'm offended because RMS acts like it's some horrible sin for people to want to place terms on sharing their stuff, but still expects them to follow the GPL. You can't have it both ways; either "sharing" is actually "piracy", or the GPL is actually a joke.
Now, I know that Stallman doesn't, in fact, endorse unauthorized copying. He's attempting to use the word "sharing" because it creates positive connotations, and helps people think about how the world would be if all copying were authorized. I agree, it's an interesting vision. Unfortunately, in the world we *actually* live in, it's essentially an invitation to the ethically-challenged to go steal things.
Do you believe that "control" is a thing?
"Property" is a creation of society. We have a list of things you can own.
When you copy something, you deprive them of something that we put on the list. Don't like this? Go change the rules.
Anyway, the fact is, people who "wouldn't really have bought it anyway" are the exception, and a very rare exception. Mostly, it's just a little lie to cover up theft.
(I once got a program without paying for it, because it was clear I would never buy it. The local autocad distributor gave me a full copy of Autocad when I was about 10, because I enjoyed playing with the demo. Note: He gave. That's okay. Taking isn't the same as giving.)
Note that he, too, is using a term solely for propaganda value. "Sharing" something you don't own isn't generally viewed in very positive terms.
Would Mr. Stallman be happy to learn that a major company was "sharing" a binary-only version of gcc which they had made substantial enhancements to? After all, we all know *sharing* can never be *wrong*.
RMS is a great guy, but never forget that he's just as much into propaganda as anyone else, and arguably moreso than most.
In many parts of the world, anyway, birth rate varies inversely with female literacy. Maybe not totally, but even getting a few people to slow down on the kids will help immensely in some areas, and the second-order effects (kids who got more attention and education when growing up will be even better off...) can start really making a difference.
Me, I'm too lazy, and too attached to my comfortable way of life. I'll stick to less direct contributions for now.
:)
However, a friend of mine has been griping about how she wants to do some good in the world, not just sit at a desk, and I forwarded the article to her.