Why? Every interview I read with the founder of Netflix says he's having a ball running the company as is, they're moderately successful, profitable (how many startups can you say THAT about?), and have a strong brand.
All beside the point. Netflix isn't a mom-and-pop business that can stay open and independent as long as they have money coming in. They're a publically held company whose management holds their jobs at the pleasure of investors. None of those investors have seen any serious returns on their investment, since profits get plowed back into the company, and the stock price is about what it was when the company went public. And some current investors have probably seen loses, assuming they bought in when the stock was about 3 times higher.
Right now investors seem to be buying managements line that they're building long-term growth. But that can't last forever, not with Netflix locked in a price war with Blockbuster. Eventually, stockholder will revolt. That will probably lead either to a hostile takeover or a management change in preparation for a friendly takeover.
Granted I'd love to see netflix do away with throttling...
Don't get your hopes up. Do the math: if you assume mailing costs are 80 cents a disk, and a non-throttled account can rent 5 disks a week, then the account costs them $17.20 in an average month just for mailing. Add in other costs and they're losing a couple dollars a month on that account. Maybe my assumptions are too high, but it's still very clear that such an account would make them a small profit, at best. So they have to throttle -- though they really ought to be more honest about the fact.
Take your blessing that they are working with OSS at all!
You mean they're helping out the OS movement just by using its product? Rather the opposite, I think. If making your software Open Source turns out to mean giving it away, with no benefit in return, people will have no incentive to make their software open source. May not matter if you're just a hacker with a cool app you want to share. But a big part of the OS movment is driven by commercial companies (IBM is prime example) who think they can be more productive in a collaborative, open environment. Convince them they're wrong, and our best sources of OS software will dry up.
If this were just about complying with an OS license, you'd be correct. But there are non-legal issues here. Apple has made a big deal of being an active participant in the KHTML project. If they were just BSing for PR purposes, they need to be called on it.
In any case, there's more to good citizenship than complying with the letter of the law when you absolutely have to, and copping a "fuck you" attitude the rest of the time.
There's a simple solution to that problem: store the fingerprints using one-way encryption, the method long used to store Unix passwords. That way you can compare a submitted password (or fingerprint) by re-encrypting it, and comparing the encrypted versions. But you can't reverse the process to obtain the original data.
I think simply having a person's fingerprint or DNA will never be as valuable a form of identity theft as stealing more traditional ID data -- social security number, mother's maiden name, etc. Why not? Because fingerprints and DNA are extremely easy to rip off, as any viewer of Law and Order knows.
In any case, the data being used is less important than security surrounding it. Even if my thumbprint or DNA were as hard to steal as my traditional ID data, it wouldn't be any more valuable. Problem is, too many organizations that collect this data are damned careless with it. Perhaps we need a Sarbannes-Oxley act for personal data collection!
But ultimately, I think we're going to have to move away from all these authentication systems that are based solely on you having some particular bit of data nobody else is supposed to know. It's just not working.
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source?
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 1
I don't know where you got the "bug all" quote, but it certainly wasn't from me. I've worked at one or two companies that decided to go through their software archives and OS whatever seemed worth the trouble. In the cases where they decided to go ahead, it was not cheap.
You're about to ask "why"? But if you have to, you didn't read my previous post.
First off, pissant is actually a word -- look it up. (One of the great mysteries of life -- why are so many language Nazis themselves ignorant of language?) Second of all, your comment typifies why people hate language Nazis -- they focus on details of a conversation, completely missing the substance. In this case, I think I made it pretty clear that I wasn't criticizing anybody's spelling.
I guess your prompt is handy if you work on a lot of different systems and accounts, and use scp or rsync a lot. But we are talking newbies here. They'll probably find the path name helpful, but the other stuff would just confuse them.
Well, yeah, English has a complicated history, so the "official" rules end up being inconsistent, strange, and even stupid. Most languages are much saner. But so what? Whining about the problems of learning "proper" English doesn't change the cost of not learning it.
...the IT industry is loosing the new graduates...
I usually sneer at Slashdot Language Nazis, but with your little error (losing, not loosing), you inadvertantly make an important point: there's more to your education than picking up specific job skills. Whether you study hardware or software, any technology you learn about will be obsolete in a decade or so. Other stuff will last you all your life: language skills (yeah, grammar and spelling rules are arbitrary and stupid, but knowing them helps you sound like less of a pissant), communication skills, general knowledge of history and culture. Don't forget critical thinking skills, which you can acquire by studying a lot of subjects like history and philosophy that don't seem to teach anything you need to know.
Most of all, you need to learn about learning. 'Cause a techie can't afford to ever stop doing that.
Just give them a sheet with the commands on like ctrl+f = forward
Wouldn't it be better to emphasize the arrow keys? I think you'll find that most keyboards have them nowadays.
Sarcasm aside, you've just demonstrated how big the mental gap can be between a hacker and a newbie, especially if the hacker has some complicated set of concepts -- like the EMACS or Vi command set -- hard-wired into his frontal lobes. Don't assume that something that comes natural to you is natural to somebody new to the subject.
A lot of the stuff that traditionally goes in shell prompts is outdated or inappropriate for newbies. If you're using using the shell in a terminal window (as almost everybody does these days, especially newbies), you don't need email notification, time, CPU load, and a lot of other crap you can have in a GUI window. The name of the machine you're on is helpful is you're access a lot of different machines -- but most newbies won't do that. (Let's all sing the Telnet Song!) I like to have the command history number in my prompt, since that makes it easier to repeat a command that hasn't scrolled off the top of the screen yet. Then again, that's obsolete too, since any decent shell has lets you uparrow back to previous commands.
I used to have something to indicate my shell depth, so I wouldn't forget that I'd shelled out of another program. But I stopped shelling out when job control was invented -- not to mention Xterm windows.
I guess there's not a lot worth putting in the prompt any more. And what you do put should mostly be embedded in an escape string that puts it in the Xterm window. No, wait a minute, that's obsolete too -- most shells now let you define a hook -- an alias or a script -- that's run before each prompt. Makes more sense to put complicated commands there.
So probably you should just set the prompt to "% " and forget about it.
As long as we picking nits, the fusion bomb was hardly the first time anybody observed fusion. Hans Bethe demonstrated that fusion causes the sun to shine in 1939. And perhaps fusion was used to explain other natural phenomena before then. The "discovery" if you want to insist on that term, goes to whoever first postulated that fusion exists.
Of course, we're all arguing over nothing. Nobody is saying that fusion has just been discovered. It's just the usual sloppy Slashdot headline.
And besides which, Apple seems to be an eager participant in the KHTML project, not just a passive consumer of its source code.
I have to assume that even if the KHTML engine isn't Acid2-compliant out of the box, the work of the Konqueror team contributed a lot to putting Safari across the finish line. Konqueror being the KDE web browser for which the KHTML engine was originally written. I'm not an passionate fan of KDE overall, but it's always seemed to me that Konqueror placed a very high priority on having a bulletproof rendering engine that was as standard-compliant as possible.
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source?
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 1
If transparency is such an overwealming priority, then I guess we should just put a webcam near the desk of each of every government employee. Of course, that would be horrendously expensive and would disrupt the day-to-day operations of government. But if we don't care about cost versus benefit ratio of OSing government software, or the disruptive effect of same, why should we care about these things in any other context?
You'd have a point if the ad were remembered for anything in the ad. But it doesn't even have a decent mindworm effect. We're only still talking about it because geeks are so absurdly infatuated with it. "Yeah! The Mac is the enemy of Big Brother! Right on!"
Does DeCSS filter out Kate Winslett's breasts when you're watching Titanic with your grandkids? If not, don't expect Republican politicians to care about it.
People do have a right to control what they watch. But it's kind of sad that this kind of self-censorship gets expedited treatment, while you can still be prosecuted for circumventing the Region protection on a movie that hasn't been released in your area.
Don't say those things! There was once a "stupid boss" story on Shark Tank about a guy who heard the "only truely secure computer" adage, and intrepreted it literally. He had a server room built with no network connections. When his underlings asked him to explain how they were supposed to connect the servers to the network without cabling, he told them they were well paid to figure that out for themselves.
If anybody comes near my desk with a blowtorch, I'm blaming you!
Apple Computer demonstrated the power of a Super Bowl ad with its 1984 ad.
What crap. Geeks love to tell each other that the 1984 ad was really cool. But to most people who see it, it's just about the stupidest commercial they've ever seen. No product identification, and the story it tells is lame and patronizing, worthy of Harlan Ellison on one of his bad days.
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source?
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 1
...but don't even bother trying to get your senator to help paint your house..
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source?
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 1
There are two purposes to be served by making a project open source. First and foremost, you allow outsider to participate in its development, which speeds development and gives the original authors a source of free peer review. Second, and rather less important, it allows outsiders to download and use the software.
I think that neither purpose would be served by OSing most government softwares. Consider that most of them are probably uninteresting programs that provide IS support for that huge bureaucracy. The typical application is probably a hacked-up database client that's only good for accessing a specialized database of soybean crop subsidy applicants, or something equally obscure.
Even if a project is marginally valuable as OS, it's probably not worth the expense of opening it up. There's more to making a project OS than "throwing it over the wall." You usually need to move your source code base from some internal CVS to a OS-friendly CVS such as Sourceforge. Most of all, you need to separate out elements that you've licensed from other people, and don't have the legal right to re-license.
Finally, there's the security issue -- opening up software can reveal security bugs. Yeah, I know, security by obscurity is not a good idea. But I'm not willing to have my tax records ripped off just to satisfy that principle.
We're not talking about the people who use the blacklist. We're talking about the people who create and maintain the damn lists. The issue at hand is how much intelligence they use in this process. If they behave stupidly, it doesn't really matter how others use their product.
Slashdot Mirror
-1: Google is your friend
Right now investors seem to be buying managements line that they're building long-term growth. But that can't last forever, not with Netflix locked in a price war with Blockbuster. Eventually, stockholder will revolt. That will probably lead either to a hostile takeover or a management change in preparation for a friendly takeover.
Don't get your hopes up. Do the math: if you assume mailing costs are 80 cents a disk, and a non-throttled account can rent 5 disks a week, then the account costs them $17.20 in an average month just for mailing. Add in other costs and they're losing a couple dollars a month on that account. Maybe my assumptions are too high, but it's still very clear that such an account would make them a small profit, at best. So they have to throttle -- though they really ought to be more honest about the fact.In any case, there's more to good citizenship than complying with the letter of the law when you absolutely have to, and copping a "fuck you" attitude the rest of the time.
I think simply having a person's fingerprint or DNA will never be as valuable a form of identity theft as stealing more traditional ID data -- social security number, mother's maiden name, etc. Why not? Because fingerprints and DNA are extremely easy to rip off, as any viewer of Law and Order knows.
In any case, the data being used is less important than security surrounding it. Even if my thumbprint or DNA were as hard to steal as my traditional ID data, it wouldn't be any more valuable. Problem is, too many organizations that collect this data are damned careless with it. Perhaps we need a Sarbannes-Oxley act for personal data collection!
But ultimately, I think we're going to have to move away from all these authentication systems that are based solely on you having some particular bit of data nobody else is supposed to know. It's just not working.
You're about to ask "why"? But if you have to, you didn't read my previous post.
First off, pissant is actually a word -- look it up. (One of the great mysteries of life -- why are so many language Nazis themselves ignorant of language?) Second of all, your comment typifies why people hate language Nazis -- they focus on details of a conversation, completely missing the substance. In this case, I think I made it pretty clear that I wasn't criticizing anybody's spelling.
I guess your prompt is handy if you work on a lot of different systems and accounts, and use scp or rsync a lot. But we are talking newbies here. They'll probably find the path name helpful, but the other stuff would just confuse them.
Well, yeah, English has a complicated history, so the "official" rules end up being inconsistent, strange, and even stupid. Most languages are much saner. But so what? Whining about the problems of learning "proper" English doesn't change the cost of not learning it.
Most of all, you need to learn about learning. 'Cause a techie can't afford to ever stop doing that.
Lots of people get money the do nothing to earn. What's painful is that every time Dvorak farts, it seems to rate a Slashdot headline!
Sarcasm aside, you've just demonstrated how big the mental gap can be between a hacker and a newbie, especially if the hacker has some complicated set of concepts -- like the EMACS or Vi command set -- hard-wired into his frontal lobes. Don't assume that something that comes natural to you is natural to somebody new to the subject.
A lot of the stuff that traditionally goes in shell prompts is outdated or inappropriate for newbies. If you're using using the shell in a terminal window (as almost everybody does these days, especially newbies), you don't need email notification, time, CPU load, and a lot of other crap you can have in a GUI window. The name of the machine you're on is helpful is you're access a lot of different machines -- but most newbies won't do that. (Let's all sing the Telnet Song!) I like to have the command history number in my prompt, since that makes it easier to repeat a command that hasn't scrolled off the top of the screen yet. Then again, that's obsolete too, since any decent shell has lets you uparrow back to previous commands.
I used to have something to indicate my shell depth, so I wouldn't forget that I'd shelled out of another program. But I stopped shelling out when job control was invented -- not to mention Xterm windows.
I guess there's not a lot worth putting in the prompt any more. And what you do put should mostly be embedded in an escape string that puts it in the Xterm window. No, wait a minute, that's obsolete too -- most shells now let you define a hook -- an alias or a script -- that's run before each prompt. Makes more sense to put complicated commands there.
So probably you should just set the prompt to "% " and forget about it.
Of course, we're all arguing over nothing. Nobody is saying that fusion has just been discovered. It's just the usual sloppy Slashdot headline.
I have to assume that even if the KHTML engine isn't Acid2-compliant out of the box, the work of the Konqueror team contributed a lot to putting Safari across the finish line. Konqueror being the KDE web browser for which the KHTML engine was originally written. I'm not an passionate fan of KDE overall, but it's always seemed to me that Konqueror placed a very high priority on having a bulletproof rendering engine that was as standard-compliant as possible.
If transparency is such an overwealming priority, then I guess we should just put a webcam near the desk of each of every government employee. Of course, that would be horrendously expensive and would disrupt the day-to-day operations of government. But if we don't care about cost versus benefit ratio of OSing government software, or the disruptive effect of same, why should we care about these things in any other context?
Actually, the only reason we're still talking about the ad is neither of us has the strength of character to walk away from an inane conversation.
You'd have a point if the ad were remembered for anything in the ad. But it doesn't even have a decent mindworm effect. We're only still talking about it because geeks are so absurdly infatuated with it. "Yeah! The Mac is the enemy of Big Brother! Right on!"
People do have a right to control what they watch. But it's kind of sad that this kind of self-censorship gets expedited treatment, while you can still be prosecuted for circumventing the Region protection on a movie that hasn't been released in your area.
If anybody comes near my desk with a blowtorch, I'm blaming you!
I think that neither purpose would be served by OSing most government softwares. Consider that most of them are probably uninteresting programs that provide IS support for that huge bureaucracy. The typical application is probably a hacked-up database client that's only good for accessing a specialized database of soybean crop subsidy applicants, or something equally obscure.
Even if a project is marginally valuable as OS, it's probably not worth the expense of opening it up. There's more to making a project OS than "throwing it over the wall." You usually need to move your source code base from some internal CVS to a OS-friendly CVS such as Sourceforge. Most of all, you need to separate out elements that you've licensed from other people, and don't have the legal right to re-license.
Finally, there's the security issue -- opening up software can reveal security bugs. Yeah, I know, security by obscurity is not a good idea. But I'm not willing to have my tax records ripped off just to satisfy that principle.
We're not talking about the people who use the blacklist. We're talking about the people who create and maintain the damn lists. The issue at hand is how much intelligence they use in this process. If they behave stupidly, it doesn't really matter how others use their product.