Umm... can you give me an example of a software company that doesn't play hardball like MS? Not counting the open source world, that is?
Oracle, Sun, IBM, AOL all have lots of skeletons in their respective closets. They all play dirty. Microsoft just happened to be more successful at the slimy game that is the software industry.
I'd suggest that a new set of rules was in order, but govt. restraint of the software industry will only slow the economy and the progress of technology. If we impose new rules and conditions on the software industry that is just one more obstacle for open source.
It strikes me as odd that perhaps the biggest complaint against MS is the browser they gave away for free, destroying Netscape. Yet here we all are reading Slashdot, using an OS(Linux) we got for free that is eating at Microsofts share.
The best thing we could do to solve the MS problem is to ignore them. Improve and proliferate the Linux OS, and MS will no longer be a monopoly. We, the programmers and users should be the ones who force MS to use accepted standards and to open their code. We should be the ones organizing a boycott if they act in an unfair way. By going to the government and asking them to solve this, we are inviting the government in to regulate everything, including Linux and Open Source.
Thanks, but no thanks. The beauty of the open source movement is that it is not regulated. If the govt. gets its fingers in the open source movement it will be corrupted beyond repair. Keep the govt. out of software!
Now, one of the first things I learned when I started building robots was to build bots that played nice and that respected this file. Obviously they don't want anyone indexing their site. They may not realize that they are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.(a site that doesn't want bots is turning away vast amounts of potential visitors-are you reading Ticketmaster?) However, I personally will always write bots that obey the robots.txt file.
Its fine by me if a site does not want to be indexed. I will always relish the story of the store that asked mysimon to stop indexing their site, only to beg them to list them again after experiencing a significant drop in traffic.
Law or no law, a site that refuses bots will experience the opposite of the slashdot effect. I can hear the wind rustling through the ghost town of ticketmaster.com already.
and only criminals have automatic or even semi-auto weapons. I can't believe that all these so-called democratic countries have taken away one of your basic freedoms.
I haven't seen this discussed on/. before, and this may very well be an entire article or "Ask Slashdot" feature of its own. Its interesting that you bring comparison shopping of this book to this discussion. I've pondered this for a while, and to me comparison shopping is where the internet and the mass-produced world collide. Simply put, I think the internet is going to totally eat away the profits of everything mass-produced, unless a radically different method of distribution is created.
On the net, you can compare prices for virtually any mass-produced product, be it books, music, clothing, or what have you. There are many really good comparison sites such as mysimon or bestwebbuys that let you compare prices and get the best price on the internet for these. Its my feeling that the internet really lends itself to using comparison shopping services. However, the end result is more often than not no profit or even a loss for the retailer. I predict that it will be impossible for a company such as amazon.com to ever become profitable.
With that in mind, given the fact that so much of our economy is based on mass-produced goods, I think we are headed on a collision course. Either there will be no retailers, and people will buy their products directly from the manufacturer, or the internet will expose the flaws of capitalism to a point that it becomes an unusable model for our economy. If the former happens, that will be bad for the public in general - everything will be produced by those massive companies capable of competing. I don't think the internet public is going to stand for that. Therefore, the only realistic thing I see happening is that the internet will destroy capitalism. If you'll recall the writings of Karl Marx(please don't call me a commie) he stated the theory of synthesis: every economic or political model would be faced with a competing model that would by the nature of that competition create a new and better model for humanity. Supposedly communism was the answer for the conflict between the money-hungry industrialists and the working class poor. We've seen that that was a mistake. The internet however, is going to completely shake up capitalism, and something(although I don't know what) is going to take its place.
OK, I'm not sure if anyone has properly analysed this yet, and I'm sorry if I spoil anyone's fun but...
#1. Read the story at advogato if you haven't already.
#2. Cordwainer Byrd from the "law firm" representing Andover has an email address from bbmma.com. A simple check at Network Solutions reveals the domain name is still available.
#3. The patent #'s in question(45,487,338,209 and 46,773,228,287) looked a little suspect to me so I checked them out at the patent office. Nope, no patents.
#4. It gets better. PR Newswire"(whoever they are, their website only has an IP address, not a qualified domain name) refers to a different patent, #5,876,324. I won't spoil this part for you. Just follow the link.
Happy april fools day! Good one, slashdot & advogato. I for one am glad there's a day where you can take things not so seriously.
Several sources inside Microsoft report that the company is gearing up for a massive buyout to make up for lost time during the antitrust case. The company has hinted it wants to "enter the Open Source community".
"Microsoft has always been a company to hedge its bets", chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying. "I think if you took a look at our track record you could say that while we were perhaps not innovators we have been especially good at taking these existing things and making them work together so that the average person could use them. Embrace, and extend, that's the Microsoft way!"
"Were not going to make the same mistake with Open Source as we did with the internet. We learned that not paying attention to the world around us will result in dire consenquences. So were going to be really listening to what the Open Source community wants and being there to provide it for them."
It was speculated that Microsoft would come out with its own version of Linux. Also overheard were buyout plans for linux.com and andover.net.
Whoops! Sorry about that, I must have mis-read what was said, being tired after about 18 hours of coding. Definitely appreciate and do not want to misrepresent your site.
Its not exactly in their license, but I've seen it written in Slashcode that they really don't want anyone using Slashcode to put up a site that is anti-slashdot. Seeing as how they are unbelievably generous enough to share the source code of a (presumably) multi-million dollar site, I think its in everyones best interest to respect their wishes.
As for myself, I'm slowly converting myself from VB/ASP/SQL Server to Linux/Perl/Mysql, thanks to slashcode for showing me how it all works together. Thanx to Rob & crew, the open source community has a new convert.
This brings some questions to mind. Here is a list of things that I can do technically. Are they all OK? Or are any of these going to get me in hot water?
1. A price comparison engine - backed by the database that is built by robots I built that scour other websites product listings. 2. Image grabbers. Say I want to have pictures for the products I'm comparing prices for. Is it OK for me to program a robot to retrieve these pictures, if they are publically displayed. 3. For that matter, content grabbers. Say I want to have reviews on my comparison engine site. Is it OK for me to grab other reviews from websites? Does it matter whether the content is original or not? 4. News grabbers. Can I take news and stock quotes from other sites and use them on mine?
As you can see, if the above were all legal, it pretty much enables anyone with some programming talent to create a really killer site. Obviously, I'd have to put things together in an original way. But being able to aggregate content by myself without having to ask or deal would be a great boon.
how about a site hack - someone could add the keywords to the meta tags that would keep waveamerica out of all the net nanny browsers and so forth. The beauty of that is that they(being anti-geek and all) would probably not notice since such a hack wouldn't change the visual appearance of their site.
#1) I am NOT pro-Microsoft. I bought a brand-new computer just last week with no OS and installed linux(that's not supposed to be possible according to the DOJ). I just think that some of the arguments, not to mention the case against them(MS) are weak. Allow the DOJ to rein in Microsoft and they will come after others next, including Open Source.
#2) My point was simply that people give away superior products for free, and so the fsck what. See #1. I did not complain one bit for being provided a free OS that works better than Windows. If Linux proliferates because of this I really don't think anyone is going to step up and cry about it if it ends up hurting Microsoft. Again, its the govt. I fear, not MS.
(people would be able to respect your opinions more if you could express them clearly instead of bury them in bad grammer, inconsistent capitalization and spelling mistakes. You could at LEAST have used a spell checker)
You pass yourself off as someone whose spelling and grammar are correct but you didn't even spell grammar right! Hint: its spelled with an a, dillwad. You go as far as to base the intelligence of your post on correct English! So I guess your entire post can be be disregarded? I hope your network is OK since you obviously can't be trusted to run it.
Well, tell me, as a consumer, how much worse off are we because MS used their monopoly to crush companies like Netscape and many others that would have brought choice and lowered prices in consumer software?
Really? Netscape crushed? Last time I checked they were still viable, although its now rolled into AOL(yeah, like they're really any better than MS) If Microsoft chooses to give software away they are crushing other companies, but if others give software away thats OK.
To see Microsoft as a monopoly, you really have to limit yourself to the Microsoft view of the computer industry. Since we all know there are several OS choices, the monopoly argument just does not hold water. Just last weekend I bought a brand new computer with no OS and I installed Linux on it. No one forced me to choose Microsoft.
I fear government intervention in the computer industry far more than I fear Microsoft. Wait till all those folks who are going after MP3s and other intellectual property issues start meddling with Open Source and trying to get that off the internet. Then we will know the enemy. Its not Microsoft. Its Big Brother.
Replication really boils down to just a couple of things when you really look at it. The first is to make sure you have a unique key column for every table you want to replicate(this is just good db design) Replication just keeps track of any changes in a separate table, then updates the replicated table either instantly or at a specified time, depending on how you set it up.
Knowing this, it wouldn't be out of the question to design a custom replication scheme if your application called for it. For every insert, update, delete, etc. that you make on your table, keep track of it in a separate table. When you are ready to perform the replication, refer to your "changes" table and use it to perform the necessary actions on your replicated table.
A table that keeps track of any changes to the DB could also be used for rolling back transactions. A transaction is really nothing more than the SQL wrapped in some logic that tests if the SQL worked or not.
Actually if you just do differential backups, there is no reason you can't store all this to disk as well. Assumming your diffs are 10MB each(high for some, low for others, I'm sure) you could store 100 of these in a gig of space and you'd have over 3 months of backup, plenty for most people.
Interesting little tidbit of info for you all... No one has ever been able to create a guitar amplifier that has sounds as good as an all-tube amp. Its a technology that has yet to be bested by anything transistor or digital, and many amp manufacturers have settled for trying to "recreate the sound of tubes" with their transistorized offerings, let alone trying to make something that sounded better than tubes.
So the next time you crank up the Metallica or NIN(or the Who in cmdrTaco's case) realize that while making modern music, they are using 1930's based technology to create it.
I thought this was the more interesting article. ESR is going into the mouth of the beast to push open open source.
I'm of the opinion that Microsoft's conversion to open source is inevitable. They are highly dependent on people developing for their platform, and once the majority of Microsoft developers insist on open source, they will have no choice.
At least mine is. The CS program at my local university would virtually require that I drop out of work to finish my degree. There are no evening and weekend classes. It is an ideal program for people in their early twenties(traditional students)that can afford to work 10 hours a week or less. In this environment, where these students can spend virtually all their time hitting the books and studying together it works, but for someone like me who has to work, it is damn near impossible.
Another big problem with traditional universities are some of the BS rules that they impose on students to complete their degree. Consider this: I have almost 100 credits -heavy on the math/science/engineering with a better than 3.2 overall GPA. But, due to the aforementioned problems(having to work, etc.), my GPA in my actual degree program at my last school(I was a transfer student) fell below a 2.0. So, I either have to lick some professors sweaty balls to get back into school or find another school to take me. Why should it be difficult for me to finish my CS degree? I'm a fricken professional computer programmer for crying out loud, and I should be able to pursue my education without hassle. These rules seem to be designed for kids, not for serious professionals looking to improve their career options.
And so, I have been seeking an online university where I can finish my degree. I think the internet with email, discussion groups, chats, and the like would provide an ideal way for me to take classes. I too would like to see employment opportunities earned solely by merit. But we all know most PHB's want to see that piece of paper. Any recommendations are encouraged.
For us at least, its just a matter of wanting an equal playing field, not preferential treatment because we are a smaller business. And in reply to those that assume that the smaller stores will have higher prices, well, all I can say is we get a lot of traffic from bestbookbuys.combecause our prices are often the best - without a big advertising budget, this is one of the few ways we can get exposure.
March 18, 1998, Tarrytown, NY - The American Booksellers Association (ABA), on behalf of itself and more than 20 independent bookstores, announced today that it has filed an anti-trust lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Barnes & Noble and Borders. The suit alleges that these large, national chain stores are using their clout with publishers to obtain secret and illegal deals and preferential treatment. The lawsuit further claims that these illegal deals put independent bookstores at a serious competitive disadvantage and pose a threat to their survival and to the diversity of American bookselling. The suit contends that these illegal dealings come in many forms, including soliciting special discounts on both large and small orders, the granting of more favorable promotional advertising terms, threatening large returns to obtain extra discounts, and other illegal dealings. Further, the suit alleges that these activities violate a federal antitrust statute, the Robinson-Patman Act, passed in the 1930's to protect small and independent retailers from unfair competition by chain stores. According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, this is the first time a group of independent businesses and their trade association have used this anti-trust statute to fight back against large, national chain stores.
I run one of the online bookstores that is selling the eBook. This was suppossed to be a fair method of distribution, with each bookstore participating in Simon & Schusters promotion having an equal opportunity to sell the book. However, the moneyed players(Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et. al.) have been allowed to give the book away, effectively shutting us little guys out of the promotion.
I feel that this is a bad sign for the first major fiction publication that is strictly electronic. If you care about the future of ecommerce, don't just give all your money to the big guys! Ensure that smaller companies can survive on the internet by patronizing their businesses as well. Otherwise we will end up with an internet that is totally dominated by big firms.
For those of you going to Barnes and Noble thinking you are doing the right thing in boycotting Amazon - you're not. In the bookstore business, B&N are widely seen as the real enemy - they are the ones going around and causing all the independents to close down. There were over 5,500 independent bookstores in the U.S. in 1990 - today there are less than 3,500. We can thank the chains, and especially B&N for our new lack of diversity of information sources.
I've been taking open source code and reselling it for years! Its really easy - at my company we have a somewhat strange naming convention so you'll see a lot of stuff like 'DWORD' or 'HRESULT' or WinMain() in our code. We just run this stuff through our code obfuscation product, plop a GUI on it, and out it goes!
Most public schools are desperately short of computer/networking help. The only reason Macs and PC's are so prevalent is a)thats all they know and b) Apple and Microsoft donate heavily to the schools so of course thats what they use. I would be willing to bet that most schools have a pile of old 486's that have been donated to them that are lying around gathering dust because they have no help getting these machines going and on the network. So volunteer! And get Linux into your public schools.
Also, if you haven't read Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, thats a mind blowing book you definitely want to read. AI is already composing poetry, creating art, and it is beginning to be able to hold conversations. Kurzweil is another elite scientist in the same league as Bill Joy, having started Kurzweil Music Systems, and his speech recognition software, which became Lernout & Hauspie. The book especially demonstrates convincingly that AI is reaping the benefits of Moore's law and will meet human levels of intelligence by the year 2020.
I think Artificial Intelligence has already come a long way. Consider the following poem written by Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet(must have been running on a Windows machine)
I think I'll crash. Just for myself with God peace on a curious sound for myself in my heart? And life is weeping From a bleeding heart of boughs bending such paths of them, of boughs bending such paths of breeze knows we've been there
I don't know about you but I'm starting to see signs of life
Slashdot Mirror
Oracle, Sun, IBM, AOL all have lots of skeletons in their respective closets. They all play dirty. Microsoft just happened to be more successful at the slimy game that is the software industry.
I'd suggest that a new set of rules was in order, but govt. restraint of the software industry will only slow the economy and the progress of technology. If we impose new rules and conditions on the software industry that is just one more obstacle for open source.
It strikes me as odd that perhaps the biggest complaint against MS is the browser they gave away for free, destroying Netscape. Yet here we all are reading Slashdot, using an OS(Linux) we got for free that is eating at Microsofts share.
The best thing we could do to solve the MS problem is to ignore them. Improve and proliferate the Linux OS, and MS will no longer be a monopoly. We, the programmers and users should be the ones who force MS to use accepted standards and to open their code. We should be the ones organizing a boycott if they act in an unfair way. By going to the government and asking them to solve this, we are inviting the government in to regulate everything, including Linux and Open Source.
Thanks, but no thanks. The beauty of the open source movement is that it is not regulated. If the govt. gets its fingers in the open source movement it will be corrupted beyond repair. Keep the govt. out of software!
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Now, one of the first things I learned when I started building robots was to build bots that played nice and that respected this file. Obviously they don't want anyone indexing their site. They may not realize that they are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.(a site that doesn't want bots is turning away vast amounts of potential visitors-are you reading Ticketmaster?) However, I personally will always write bots that obey the robots.txt file.
Its fine by me if a site does not want to be indexed. I will always relish the story of the store that asked mysimon to stop indexing their site, only to beg them to list them again after experiencing a significant drop in traffic.
Law or no law, a site that refuses bots will experience the opposite of the slashdot effect. I can hear the wind rustling through the ghost town of ticketmaster.com already.
I guess Amazon is being "selective" in which reviews they are posting. Otherwise, how can such tripe average a 4-star rating?
and only criminals have automatic or even semi-auto weapons. I can't believe that all these so-called democratic countries have taken away one of your basic freedoms.
On the net, you can compare prices for virtually any mass-produced product, be it books, music, clothing, or what have you. There are many really good comparison sites such as mysimon or bestwebbuys that let you compare prices and get the best price on the internet for these. Its my feeling that the internet really lends itself to using comparison shopping services. However, the end result is more often than not no profit or even a loss for the retailer. I predict that it will be impossible for a company such as amazon.com to ever become profitable.
With that in mind, given the fact that so much of our economy is based on mass-produced goods, I think we are headed on a collision course. Either there will be no retailers, and people will buy their products directly from the manufacturer, or the internet will expose the flaws of capitalism to a point that it becomes an unusable model for our economy. If the former happens, that will be bad for the public in general - everything will be produced by those massive companies capable of competing. I don't think the internet public is going to stand for that. Therefore, the only realistic thing I see happening is that the internet will destroy capitalism. If you'll recall the writings of Karl Marx(please don't call me a commie) he stated the theory of synthesis: every economic or political model would be faced with a competing model that would by the nature of that competition create a new and better model for humanity. Supposedly communism was the answer for the conflict between the money-hungry industrialists and the working class poor. We've seen that that was a mistake. The internet however, is going to completely shake up capitalism, and something(although I don't know what) is going to take its place.
#1. Read the story at advogato if you haven't already.
#2. Cordwainer Byrd from the "law firm" representing Andover has an email address from bbmma.com. A simple check at Network Solutions reveals the domain name is still available.
#3. The patent #'s in question(45,487,338,209 and 46,773,228,287) looked a little suspect to me so I checked them out at the patent office. Nope, no patents.
#4. It gets better. PR Newswire"(whoever they are, their website only has an IP address, not a qualified domain name) refers to a different patent, #5,876,324. I won't spoil this part for you. Just follow the link.
Happy april fools day! Good one, slashdot & advogato. I for one am glad there's a day where you can take things not so seriously.
"Microsoft has always been a company to hedge its bets", chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying. "I think if you took a look at our track record you could say that while we were perhaps not innovators we have been especially good at taking these existing things and making them work together so that the average person could use them. Embrace, and extend, that's the Microsoft way!"
"Were not going to make the same mistake with Open Source as we did with the internet. We learned that not paying attention to the world around us will result in dire consenquences. So were going to be really listening to what the Open Source community wants and being there to provide it for them."
It was speculated that Microsoft would come out with its own version of Linux. Also overheard were buyout plans for linux.com and andover.net.
Whoops! Sorry about that, I must have mis-read what was said, being tired after about 18 hours of coding. Definitely appreciate and do not want to misrepresent your site.
As for myself, I'm slowly converting myself from VB/ASP/SQL Server to Linux/Perl/Mysql, thanks to slashcode for showing me how it all works together. Thanx to Rob & crew, the open source community has a new convert.
1. A price comparison engine - backed by the database that is built by robots I built that scour other websites product listings.
2. Image grabbers. Say I want to have pictures for the products I'm comparing prices for. Is it OK for me to program a robot to retrieve these pictures, if they are publically displayed.
3. For that matter, content grabbers. Say I want to have reviews on my comparison engine site. Is it OK for me to grab other reviews from websites? Does it matter whether the content is original or not?
4. News grabbers. Can I take news and stock quotes from other sites and use them on mine?
As you can see, if the above were all legal, it pretty much enables anyone with some programming talent to create a really killer site. Obviously, I'd have to put things together in an original way. But being able to aggregate content by myself without having to ask or deal would be a great boon.
Please comment!
how about a site hack - someone could add the keywords to the meta tags that would keep waveamerica out of all the net nanny browsers and so forth. The beauty of that is that they(being anti-geek and all) would probably not notice since such a hack wouldn't change the visual appearance of their site.
#2) My point was simply that people give away superior products for free, and so the fsck what. See #1. I did not complain one bit for being provided a free OS that works better than Windows. If Linux proliferates because of this I really don't think anyone is going to step up and cry about it if it ends up hurting Microsoft. Again, its the govt. I fear, not MS.
You pass yourself off as someone whose spelling and grammar are correct but you didn't even spell grammar right! Hint: its spelled with an a, dillwad. You go as far as to base the intelligence of your post on correct English! So I guess your entire post can be be disregarded? I hope your network is OK since you obviously can't be trusted to run it.
Really? Netscape crushed? Last time I checked they were still viable, although its now rolled into AOL(yeah, like they're really any better than MS) If Microsoft chooses to give software away they are crushing other companies, but if others give software away thats OK.
To see Microsoft as a monopoly, you really have to limit yourself to the Microsoft view of the computer industry. Since we all know there are several OS choices, the monopoly argument just does not hold water. Just last weekend I bought a brand new computer with no OS and I installed Linux on it. No one forced me to choose Microsoft.
I fear government intervention in the computer industry far more than I fear Microsoft. Wait till all those folks who are going after MP3s and other intellectual property issues start meddling with Open Source and trying to get that off the internet. Then we will know the enemy. Its not Microsoft. Its Big Brother.
Knowing this, it wouldn't be out of the question to design a custom replication scheme if your application called for it. For every insert, update, delete, etc. that you make on your table, keep track of it in a separate table. When you are ready to perform the replication, refer to your "changes" table and use it to perform the necessary actions on your replicated table.
A table that keeps track of any changes to the DB could also be used for rolling back transactions. A transaction is really nothing more than the SQL wrapped in some logic that tests if the SQL worked or not.
Have fun!
Actually if you just do differential backups, there is no reason you can't store all this to disk as well. Assumming your diffs are 10MB each(high for some, low for others, I'm sure) you could store 100 of these in a gig of space and you'd have over 3 months of backup, plenty for most people.
So the next time you crank up the Metallica or NIN(or the Who in cmdrTaco's case) realize that while making modern music, they are using 1930's based technology to create it.
I'm of the opinion that Microsoft's conversion to open source is inevitable. They are highly dependent on people developing for their platform, and once the majority of Microsoft developers insist on open source, they will have no choice.
Another big problem with traditional universities are some of the BS rules that they impose on students to complete their degree. Consider this: I have almost 100 credits -heavy on the math/science/engineering with a better than 3.2 overall GPA. But, due to the aforementioned problems(having to work, etc.), my GPA in my actual degree program at my last school(I was a transfer student) fell below a 2.0. So, I either have to lick some professors sweaty balls to get back into school or find another school to take me. Why should it be difficult for me to finish my CS degree? I'm a fricken professional computer programmer for crying out loud, and I should be able to pursue my education without hassle. These rules seem to be designed for kids, not for serious professionals looking to improve their career options.
And so, I have been seeking an online university where I can finish my degree. I think the internet with email, discussion groups, chats, and the like would provide an ideal way for me to take classes. I too would like to see employment opportunities earned solely by merit. But we all know most PHB's want to see that piece of paper. Any recommendations are encouraged.
For us at least, its just a matter of wanting an equal playing field, not preferential treatment because we are a smaller business. And in reply to those that assume that the smaller stores will have higher prices, well, all I can say is we get a lot of traffic from bestbookbuys.combecause our prices are often the best - without a big advertising budget, this is one of the few ways we can get exposure.
March 18, 1998, Tarrytown, NY - The American Booksellers Association (ABA), on behalf of itself and more than 20 independent bookstores, announced today that it has filed an anti-trust lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Barnes & Noble and Borders. The suit alleges that these large, national chain stores are using their clout with publishers to obtain secret and illegal deals and preferential treatment. The lawsuit further claims that these illegal deals put independent bookstores at a serious competitive disadvantage and pose a threat to their survival and to the diversity of American bookselling. The suit contends that these illegal dealings come in many forms, including soliciting special discounts on both large and small orders, the granting of more favorable promotional advertising terms, threatening large returns to obtain extra discounts, and other illegal dealings. Further, the suit alleges that these activities violate a federal antitrust statute, the Robinson-Patman Act, passed in the 1930's to protect small and independent retailers from unfair competition by chain stores. According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, this is the first time a group of independent businesses and their trade association have used this anti-trust statute to fight back against large, national chain stores.
I feel that this is a bad sign for the first major fiction publication that is strictly electronic. If you care about the future of ecommerce, don't just give all your money to the big guys! Ensure that smaller companies can survive on the internet by patronizing their businesses as well. Otherwise we will end up with an internet that is totally dominated by big firms.
For those of you going to Barnes and Noble thinking you are doing the right thing in boycotting Amazon - you're not. In the bookstore business, B&N are widely seen as the real enemy - they are the ones going around and causing all the independents to close down. There were over 5,500 independent bookstores in the U.S. in 1990 - today there are less than 3,500. We can thank the chains, and especially B&N for our new lack of diversity of information sources.
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
Most public schools are desperately short of computer/networking help. The only reason Macs and PC's are so prevalent is a)thats all they know and b) Apple and Microsoft donate heavily to the schools so of course thats what they use. I would be willing to bet that most schools have a pile of old 486's that have been donated to them that are lying around gathering dust because they have no help getting these machines going and on the network. So volunteer! And get Linux into your public schools.
Also, if you haven't read Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, thats a mind blowing book you definitely want to read. AI is already composing poetry, creating art, and it is beginning to be able to hold conversations. Kurzweil is another elite scientist in the same league as Bill Joy, having started Kurzweil Music Systems, and his speech recognition software, which became Lernout & Hauspie. The book especially demonstrates convincingly that AI is reaping the benefits of Moore's law and will meet human levels of intelligence by the year 2020.
I think I'll crash. Just for myself with God peace on a curious sound for myself in my heart? And life is weeping From a bleeding heart of boughs bending such paths of them, of boughs bending such paths of breeze knows we've been there
I don't know about you but I'm starting to see signs of life