IBM is such a big company that it is impossible to look at their financial reports and figure out How much of their revenue comes from Linux consulting. Additionally, IBM invented FUD and they are excellent snake oil salesmen.
You have a point, but my sense of things that IBM at least has a good sense of how to leverage OSS. They don't tend to put OSS investment into products that can legitimately compete with their proprietary apps (DB/2, WebSphere, etC). But anything that can make it cheaper and easier for people to run those apps is all good for them.
IBM is still a different category from Red Hat, though. I don't see them developing OSS products. They just target Linux as the OS.
Actually the do quite a bit of OSS work. Eclipse is a big project by them to develop an open source Java IDE environment. They contribute heavily to existing OS proejcts like Linux and Apache. For a quick list of OSS stuff they work on, check out this link
Actually, the most successful OSS company out there is IBM. Granted, they are by no means a pure OSS company, but they understand how you leverage OSS effectively. They use their open source products to build a platform upon which they sell proprietary products and consulting services.
It is impossible to run a business selling something that people can get for free. You have to add value to it somewhere or people aren't going to bother with it. I can download RedHat 8.0 from the website, so why would I buy it? I might buy it for support. I might buy it to take advantage of the update tool they have available for it. But they have to give me a reason to send them a check other than out of the goodness of my heart.
RedHat started off as a company doing the very low end of this business, just packaging and selling the software and now they are trying to work their way up the food chain. They take their software and bundle it with higher-end proprietary products, they offer support, and they offer consulting services. It's going to take a long while to build up consulting services, so it makes sense that, for now, they have a hard time breaking even. Eventually having an established brand and knoweledgeable people will make it possible for them to succeed.
These guys have to figure out how they're going to generate some money," said Aberdeen analyst Bill Claybrook. "If Red Hat Advanced Server is part of a deal with Oracle (9i database software) on a cluster of four Dell machines, each of which has four CPUs, Oracle gets $60,000 a CPU, or $960,000, Dell gets $150,000 or so for the hardware, and Red Hat will get $10,000.
The dollar figures are totally meaningless here without a context for what the costs were going in. How much does it cost Dell in time, resources, personnel, etc, to build that server? How much did it cost Oracl in developer hours to get their product out the door?
The thing is that, revenue numbers can be a hell of a lot lower for an open source driven business and still be profitable because their outlays are substantially less. Sure RedHat pays for some development work on Linux, but it's not nearly the amount they'd have to pay in if they were a proprietary software vendor.
RedHat probably has lower margins than Oracle, but does it really matter? As long as they make profit sufficient enough to maintain the business over the long term, it's irrelevant. Sure, RedHat may never be as big as Oracle or Dell, but maybe that's a positive sign of change in the industry. Less people working at software companies, and more people doing real work with the software that is now cheaper and higher quality.
The more things change...
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Looking abck at the last 8 years that has left you unable to use the Internet, do you feel that this deprevation has had any positive benefits on you? Did you have to find other hobbies that you now enjoy to while away the hours you used to spend hacking?
The problem is that until there are good Linux games, Linux users aren't going to take the platform seriously. Until the Linux users take the platform seriously, there will be no developers working on games for it.
Generally speaking people who have Linux also have a windows computer around. The deeper a person is into gaming the greater the chance that they'll have Windows as at least a dual-boot option. I know very few people who run Linux exclusively and none of them are heavy gamers.
I've begun to think that the only thing that has the potential to bring the Linux platform into a better gaming position is a community effort to produce something truly unique for Linux. Independent developers, as you point out, cannot afford such a plan. Big developers aren't willing to take the risk. So in the end it may just need to be a collective of interested geeks hacking away. Of course that's how Linux came to be what it is, so I suppose that'd be an appropriate way for it to become a gaming platform.
Yes, it officially marks how bad things are for Linux gaming. Game developers continue release second rate and late products for Linux when they bother to release anything at all. I predict that all this work for the Linux client will have been a waste because those who really wanted the game already got it for Windows.
What would be a good milestone, and something that I have yet to see is a really good game being released to Linux first (or only for Linux). Don't get me wrong, there are some good games for Linux, but nothing that has Windows gamers contemplating installing RedHat just so they can play those games. That's what I'd like to see, but it'll have to be an independent developer that does this because none of the major vendors are going to take the chance on it.
Yeah I already got tuned into that one. It's pretty good, but not great. Major problem is that it's all back catalog music. It takes a long time for the latest music from my favorite bands to end up there. But still I send them my money every month.
Isn't much of the digital media like DAT Tapes and CD-R's taxes already for such a purpose? And isn't the RIAA copy-protecting CD's in a way that essentially mitigates the supposed harm that they were going to get from the sales of the recording media?
But you know, I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'd pay $10-20/month for unlimited acccess to a large library of music. If I paid this through a tax and it protected me from the RIAA trying to mess with on-line trading, I'd almost be okay with it except for two big problems:
1) People who didn't use P2P would get no choice in the matter 2) The money wouldn't be going to non-RIAA artists whose songs could be traded just as easily
So, good theory RIAA, but go back to the drawing board.
How many programmers in circulation can program an 8052 microcontroller? How many can program Windows?
This is the advantage that Microsoft gets in the embedded market. The system may be overkill for most of these applications, but with hordes of developers who have experience with the platform, you can find people to do the work for much cheaper.
Singapore has developed a robotic brain surgeon. The interesting bit: based on a Linux platform.
No, the fact that it's a ROBOT performing BRAIN SURGERY, is pretty banal. It's the fact that it all runs on Linux that makes it cool. HUH?? Who cares what platform they used for it? The fact that somebody has made a robot that performs brain surgery is impressive. It's nice that it's running on Linux, but is that really that important?
If a company re-publishes the work, it does not alter the original date of the copyright. If that were true Disney wouldn't care if the copyright term was 20 years or 100 years, they'd just keep re-releasing the films every 20 years to protect them. Furthermore, if that were true, then the "limited times" clause would clearly be violated because an individual copyright holder would be allowed to extend their copyright in perpetuity.
I don't have time right now to go digging into the statutes, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the case. Now, let's say a song was copyrighted, and then it was recorded. The words and notes of the song have one copyright and the performance has another copyright. Each additional recording of the performance could be copyrighted by itself, but that wouldn't effect the copyright of the original.
Thus, even if bach's original music is no longer subject to copyright I cannot:
1) freely copy a CD of a recording of the music done by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
2) freely copy sheet music published by a sheet music producer
I could, on the other hand, write my own sheet music and sell it legally. I could also make my own performance and copy it all I wanted (or copy other performances that had individually expired).
Under current copyright law there is no requirement that a work be re-published in order for it's copyright to be maintained. There are several cases where an author's work is locked up under the control of a publisher who has no economic interest in producing new copies. So the work is effectively lost even if the author wanted to give it away for free.
As for protecting the little guy, yes it was. It was founded in direct opposition to the way the English copyright system worked. There, publishers held onto the copyrights for indefinite lengths of time. They saw this as being counterproductive, and thus set the limitations that exist in our constitution. Of course along the way the same forces that lead to those copyright policies in England have risen here as well and that's why we have this mess today.
The side effect of this ruling is that it will reduce the diversity of works over the long term. Most books and music that are published never get a lot of circulation and aren't valuable enough to be worth publishing over the long term. These works slowly degrade over time and become unavailable in the future. Will you be able to play the CD you buy today in 90+ years? No. So unless somebody makes an extroridnary effort to archive this material in the hope that EVENTUALLY it will become legal to copy it, much of it will cease to exist.
The result of this is that in the future, we will find that the historical media we have available to us will be only those things that have ongoing popularity enough to warrant their continual republication. Think about this, in 90 years, you'll still be able to buy the Beatles greatest hits, but you won't be able to buy MC Hammer's greatest hits. You might think, "well who'd want to buy that anyhow", but it's a part of our culture that will forever be lost. Nobody will be able to go back and say, "what the hell were they thinking?" because for all intents and purposes it will have never existed.
Now, granted, forgetting that MC Hammer ever existed might not be the greatest tragedy to face our culture. But think about how many books are being written about 9/11 and the coming Gulf War II (the Wrath of Bush). How many of those will be preserved for history? Historians will go back and only get a limited perspective on events and judge them differently because of that limitation. This is the process that allows the victor to write the history.
Maybe what we need to do with copyright is alter how it works slightly. Instead of it being a fixed term for all works, what about varying the term based on how recently it was actively published. So, if you publish a book and don't run new printings for 20 years, the book goes into the public domain. This way, over time the most popular and high grossing copyrighted material would be preserved for it's money making ability. The lower popularity material would be preserved through the free ability to copy amongst those with an interest in it.
The risk here isn't that we'll never get to make free copies of Mickey, but rather that a vast collection of works will simply cease to exist from publishing neglect. This extension of copyright insures that a greater volume of work will disintegrate from neglect before it can be perserved in the free copying environment of the public domain.
I've used Konqueror and Mozilla quite routinely and I eventually got frustrated with pages not rendering properly in Konqueror. So I've been using Mozilla for most of my browsing since then. I've found that it works quite well for all but the most IE-centric web pages. Perhaps the latest version of Konqueror is better, but I'm pretty happy with how Mozilla does.
This article seems to not appreciate one minor issue. Most people get their Internet from either the cable company or the phone company. Whether you attach a wifi access point at the end and use VoIP to call people, you still have to pay them to get your Internet service.
Now, let's think about this...
Your local phone company charges you say $30/month for phone service. It then charges you $50/month for internet service. You get some VoIP setup and you end up paying them only $50/month instead of the $80 you would have been paying if you also had to get your phone through them. Or perhaps you get your service through a CLEC and you pay your CLEC $50, and now your phone company is only making even less on you (possibly less than they were on the original phone service).
Ultimately this suggests that the phone companies are going to end up charging higher fees for their Internet service in order to make up for the shortfall in local phone service.
Now, let's look at your cable company because they face similar problems. Why would I pay them $50/month for TV, and $50/month for internet, when I can just buy the Internet and get TV programming off the Internet? So they end up paying for a bunch of infrastructure and risk making the same amount they've been making. AT&T has tried to bundle VoIP phone service into their cable systems, but why would you buy it from them as opposed to anybody else?
This is the first time that I've seen a distributed cracking project that actually tackles an interesting problem with practical real-world implications. All the RSA cracking contests are neat and all, but they don't really have a lot of practical impact on the world. This, if it succeeds would be huge.
Having said that though, that key is enormous, and the odds that they find this key before it becomes irrelevant are extrordinarily slim. Still, it would be interesting to see the nature of the shit that hit the fan if they did indeed get the key.
What would probably make the most sense is to accentuate expertise in one language with some dabbling in other languages. A lot of places, for example, will look for people that have both Java and C++. Really though what will get you the good jobs is the things beyond raw programming skill. That is:
1) Ability to interact with other humans without scaring them
2) Familiarity with standard processes for developing and documenting development
3) An ability to understand the business needs and realities that impact the code
Code monkeys are cheap and easy to come by, but people with a good head on their shoulders and a breadth of knowledge are what get the good jobs.
Children are not able to fully understand and cope, on their own, with the violence evidences in such games.
Assuming that is a true statement, define children. How old does a child have to be before they can cope? Do we suddenly get granted this magical ability at 18?
Children growing up in an environment where such media violence is taken for granted often take real violence for granted in their life.
Really? Could you show me the scientifically valid survey that prooves this? Because everything I've read has show that the research on the subject is, at best, inconclusive.
The big problem I have with ratings systems and regulation of games, etc, is that it doesn't take into account the fact that children mature at different rates. This is less of an issue with video games because, regardless of rating, the parent can always buy the video game for their child. That's what's important here is the parents right to choose what's okay for their child to see.
I remember parents who wouldn't let their kids listen to Madonna thinking it would corrupt them. That's ridiculous in my opinion, but I fully support that parent's right to make that choice for their kids. As long as video game ratings remain a voluntary advisory system they are all okay in my book.
What I've loathed for a very long time is the movie ratings system. When I was 15, I was mature enough to deal with anything I've ever seen in an R rated movie but I still couldn't go see them in the theater unless my mom really wanted to come sit through it (which did happen on occasion thankfully). She couldn't write me a note of approval, or even just show up to buy me the tickets, she had to sit through the whole damn movie. If she had no desire to see it, I had to wait for video or HBO. The greatest irony was that the strict enforcement in the theaters did nothing to stop me from seeing the movies, it just delayed it.
The thing is that the governments and europe have a much different sense of themselves than here. The government here, for the most part, hates itself. It seems to, at every turn, want to eliminate itself (or at least as much as possible without firing themselves or their buddies). So they look at the RIAA and think that they have the right to own what they've produced and that the government shouldn't interfere with that. This perspective is very distorted, but I digress.
In europe, the government sees itself having a more important and larger role in the lives of the people. Larger social wellfare programs, etc, are all part of that mentaility. This also means that they are less likely to bend to the will of large corporations at a moments whim. Furthermore, let's think about this, it is the RIAA. That second A is for America, and somehow I doubt most european bureaucrats will take kindly to the RIAA trying to dictate terms to them. If nothing else you can count on a general dislike of American hegemony to tilt the game out of the RIAA's favor.
This already exists. Just go play some Magic the Gathering sometime, and you'll see how this operation works. You go out and buy all of these decks of cards and if you get lucky you get good cards, but then if you want to be really good you need to go buy all these out-of-print rare cards from other people.
The major difference is that the buying of those out-of-print rare cards, though a big cost, is at least going to other players. Instead of having the company screw you for all the money you become part of the market, being able to buy and sell these cards.
And you don't have to pay taxes either because it's voluntary!:). riiiiiight
Evolution still works to some extent. If you are gullible enough to believe that you can't be prosecuted if you host kiddie porn on somebody else's server, you will go to jail. It's difficult to propogate your genetic line with your prison bunkmate (though he may try to do so despite your pleas to the contrary), so you will be isolated from the gene pool and society will evolve.
The thing is that we don't have the perspective of history to indicate to us what will have long term relevance. I mean they listed Viagra on there. VIAGRA? I'm sorry, but the ability for an old man to get an erection is not one of the greatest innovations of the last 85 years.
One thing I didn't see on the list was nanotechnology, which is going to hugely impact the future. We're only seeing it in limited ways so far, but 10 or 20 years from now it's going to revolutionize a lot of things. Also, one thing I noticed was that, while a number of inventions like fiber optics were created some time ago, it's only recently that the implementations have borne practical fruit.
One of the primary values of the awards shows for movies and music is that, for the most part, the people who are receiving awards are attractive, or at least interesting to look at. Somehow I don't think the show's going to appeal to much of an audience when the stage is populated by people who can barely survive in sunlight:).
Regardless, it's good to see the videogame industry being recognized for it's impact on the world in a positive way. Most of the time when it gets shown in the public light it's surrounded by phrases like, "graphic violence", and "think of the children".
That's really cool that they are going to release their modifications. There generosity knows no bounds. I mean wow, it's not like the license for the software they are modifying requires them to release those modificaitons... er...
Nevermind...
Don't get me wrong though, this is great news regardless:)
Slashdot Mirror
IBM is such a big company that it is impossible to look at their financial reports and figure out How much of their revenue comes from Linux consulting. Additionally, IBM invented FUD and they are excellent snake oil salesmen.
You have a point, but my sense of things that IBM at least has a good sense of how to leverage OSS. They don't tend to put OSS investment into products that can legitimately compete with their proprietary apps (DB/2, WebSphere, etC). But anything that can make it cheaper and easier for people to run those apps is all good for them.
IBM is still a different category from Red Hat, though. I don't see them developing OSS products. They just target Linux as the OS.
Actually the do quite a bit of OSS work. Eclipse is a big project by them to develop an open source Java IDE environment. They contribute heavily to existing OS proejcts like Linux and Apache. For a quick list of OSS stuff they work on, check out this link
Actually, the most successful OSS company out there is IBM. Granted, they are by no means a pure OSS company, but they understand how you leverage OSS effectively. They use their open source products to build a platform upon which they sell proprietary products and consulting services.
It is impossible to run a business selling something that people can get for free. You have to add value to it somewhere or people aren't going to bother with it. I can download RedHat 8.0 from the website, so why would I buy it? I might buy it for support. I might buy it to take advantage of the update tool they have available for it. But they have to give me a reason to send them a check other than out of the goodness of my heart.
RedHat started off as a company doing the very low end of this business, just packaging and selling the software and now they are trying to work their way up the food chain. They take their software and bundle it with higher-end proprietary products, they offer support, and they offer consulting services. It's going to take a long while to build up consulting services, so it makes sense that, for now, they have a hard time breaking even. Eventually having an established brand and knoweledgeable people will make it possible for them to succeed.
From the article:
These guys have to figure out how they're going to generate some money," said Aberdeen analyst Bill Claybrook. "If Red Hat Advanced Server is part of a deal with Oracle (9i database software) on a cluster of four Dell machines, each of which has four CPUs, Oracle gets $60,000 a CPU, or $960,000, Dell gets $150,000 or so for the hardware, and Red Hat will get $10,000.
The dollar figures are totally meaningless here without a context for what the costs were going in. How much does it cost Dell in time, resources, personnel, etc, to build that server? How much did it cost Oracl in developer hours to get their product out the door?
The thing is that, revenue numbers can be a hell of a lot lower for an open source driven business and still be profitable because their outlays are substantially less. Sure RedHat pays for some development work on Linux, but it's not nearly the amount they'd have to pay in if they were a proprietary software vendor.
RedHat probably has lower margins than Oracle, but does it really matter? As long as they make profit sufficient enough to maintain the business over the long term, it's irrelevant. Sure, RedHat may never be as big as Oracle or Dell, but maybe that's a positive sign of change in the industry. Less people working at software companies, and more people doing real work with the software that is now cheaper and higher quality.
Looking abck at the last 8 years that has left you unable to use the Internet, do you feel that this deprevation has had any positive benefits on you? Did you have to find other hobbies that you now enjoy to while away the hours you used to spend hacking?
The problem is that until there are good Linux games, Linux users aren't going to take the platform seriously. Until the Linux users take the platform seriously, there will be no developers working on games for it.
Generally speaking people who have Linux also have a windows computer around. The deeper a person is into gaming the greater the chance that they'll have Windows as at least a dual-boot option. I know very few people who run Linux exclusively and none of them are heavy gamers.
I've begun to think that the only thing that has the potential to bring the Linux platform into a better gaming position is a community effort to produce something truly unique for Linux. Independent developers, as you point out, cannot afford such a plan. Big developers aren't willing to take the risk. So in the end it may just need to be a collective of interested geeks hacking away. Of course that's how Linux came to be what it is, so I suppose that'd be an appropriate way for it to become a gaming platform.
Yes, it officially marks how bad things are for Linux gaming. Game developers continue release second rate and late products for Linux when they bother to release anything at all. I predict that all this work for the Linux client will have been a waste because those who really wanted the game already got it for Windows.
What would be a good milestone, and something that I have yet to see is a really good game being released to Linux first (or only for Linux). Don't get me wrong, there are some good games for Linux, but nothing that has Windows gamers contemplating installing RedHat just so they can play those games. That's what I'd like to see, but it'll have to be an independent developer that does this because none of the major vendors are going to take the chance on it.
Yeah I already got tuned into that one. It's pretty good, but not great. Major problem is that it's all back catalog music. It takes a long time for the latest music from my favorite bands to end up there. But still I send them my money every month.
Isn't much of the digital media like DAT Tapes and CD-R's taxes already for such a purpose? And isn't the RIAA copy-protecting CD's in a way that essentially mitigates the supposed harm that they were going to get from the sales of the recording media?
But you know, I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'd pay $10-20/month for unlimited acccess to a large library of music. If I paid this through a tax and it protected me from the RIAA trying to mess with on-line trading, I'd almost be okay with it except for two big problems:
1) People who didn't use P2P would get no choice in the matter
2) The money wouldn't be going to non-RIAA artists whose songs could be traded just as easily
So, good theory RIAA, but go back to the drawing board.
Will auto insurance in the future cover kernel panic related accidents?
Insurance company: So the accident was caused when the steering wheel ceased to function?
Driver: Yes, that's right.
Insurance company: What version of Linux are you using?
Driver: Ummmm.... 2.4.6
Insurance company: I'm sorry, your policy only covers as far back as 2.4.12.
How many programmers in circulation can program an 8052 microcontroller? How many can program Windows?
This is the advantage that Microsoft gets in the embedded market. The system may be overkill for most of these applications, but with hordes of developers who have experience with the platform, you can find people to do the work for much cheaper.
Singapore has developed a robotic brain surgeon. The interesting bit: based on a Linux platform.
No, the fact that it's a ROBOT performing BRAIN SURGERY, is pretty banal. It's the fact that it all runs on Linux that makes it cool. HUH?? Who cares what platform they used for it? The fact that somebody has made a robot that performs brain surgery is impressive. It's nice that it's running on Linux, but is that really that important?
If a company re-publishes the work, it does not alter the original date of the copyright. If that were true Disney wouldn't care if the copyright term was 20 years or 100 years, they'd just keep re-releasing the films every 20 years to protect them. Furthermore, if that were true, then the "limited times" clause would clearly be violated because an individual copyright holder would be allowed to extend their copyright in perpetuity.
I don't have time right now to go digging into the statutes, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the case. Now, let's say a song was copyrighted, and then it was recorded. The words and notes of the song have one copyright and the performance has another copyright. Each additional recording of the performance could be copyrighted by itself, but that wouldn't effect the copyright of the original.
Thus, even if bach's original music is no longer subject to copyright I cannot:
1) freely copy a CD of a recording of the music done by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
2) freely copy sheet music published by a sheet music producer
I could, on the other hand, write my own sheet music and sell it legally. I could also make my own performance and copy it all I wanted (or copy other performances that had individually expired).
Under current copyright law there is no requirement that a work be re-published in order for it's copyright to be maintained. There are several cases where an author's work is locked up under the control of a publisher who has no economic interest in producing new copies. So the work is effectively lost even if the author wanted to give it away for free.
As for protecting the little guy, yes it was. It was founded in direct opposition to the way the English copyright system worked. There, publishers held onto the copyrights for indefinite lengths of time. They saw this as being counterproductive, and thus set the limitations that exist in our constitution. Of course along the way the same forces that lead to those copyright policies in England have risen here as well and that's why we have this mess today.
The side effect of this ruling is that it will reduce the diversity of works over the long term. Most books and music that are published never get a lot of circulation and aren't valuable enough to be worth publishing over the long term. These works slowly degrade over time and become unavailable in the future. Will you be able to play the CD you buy today in 90+ years? No. So unless somebody makes an extroridnary effort to archive this material in the hope that EVENTUALLY it will become legal to copy it, much of it will cease to exist.
The result of this is that in the future, we will find that the historical media we have available to us will be only those things that have ongoing popularity enough to warrant their continual republication. Think about this, in 90 years, you'll still be able to buy the Beatles greatest hits, but you won't be able to buy MC Hammer's greatest hits. You might think, "well who'd want to buy that anyhow", but it's a part of our culture that will forever be lost. Nobody will be able to go back and say, "what the hell were they thinking?" because for all intents and purposes it will have never existed.
Now, granted, forgetting that MC Hammer ever existed might not be the greatest tragedy to face our culture. But think about how many books are being written about 9/11 and the coming Gulf War II (the Wrath of Bush). How many of those will be preserved for history? Historians will go back and only get a limited perspective on events and judge them differently because of that limitation. This is the process that allows the victor to write the history.
Maybe what we need to do with copyright is alter how it works slightly. Instead of it being a fixed term for all works, what about varying the term based on how recently it was actively published. So, if you publish a book and don't run new printings for 20 years, the book goes into the public domain. This way, over time the most popular and high grossing copyrighted material would be preserved for it's money making ability. The lower popularity material would be preserved through the free ability to copy amongst those with an interest in it.
The risk here isn't that we'll never get to make free copies of Mickey, but rather that a vast collection of works will simply cease to exist from publishing neglect. This extension of copyright insures that a greater volume of work will disintegrate from neglect before it can be perserved in the free copying environment of the public domain.
I've used Konqueror and Mozilla quite routinely and I eventually got frustrated with pages not rendering properly in Konqueror. So I've been using Mozilla for most of my browsing since then. I've found that it works quite well for all but the most IE-centric web pages. Perhaps the latest version of Konqueror is better, but I'm pretty happy with how Mozilla does.
This article seems to not appreciate one minor issue. Most people get their Internet from either the cable company or the phone company. Whether you attach a wifi access point at the end and use VoIP to call people, you still have to pay them to get your Internet service.
Now, let's think about this...
Your local phone company charges you say $30/month for phone service. It then charges you $50/month for internet service. You get some VoIP setup and you end up paying them only $50/month instead of the $80 you would have been paying if you also had to get your phone through them. Or perhaps you get your service through a CLEC and you pay your CLEC $50, and now your phone company is only making even less on you (possibly less than they were on the original phone service).
Ultimately this suggests that the phone companies are going to end up charging higher fees for their Internet service in order to make up for the shortfall in local phone service.
Now, let's look at your cable company because they face similar problems. Why would I pay them $50/month for TV, and $50/month for internet, when I can just buy the Internet and get TV programming off the Internet? So they end up paying for a bunch of infrastructure and risk making the same amount they've been making. AT&T has tried to bundle VoIP phone service into their cable systems, but why would you buy it from them as opposed to anybody else?
This is the first time that I've seen a distributed cracking project that actually tackles an interesting problem with practical real-world implications. All the RSA cracking contests are neat and all, but they don't really have a lot of practical impact on the world. This, if it succeeds would be huge.
Having said that though, that key is enormous, and the odds that they find this key before it becomes irrelevant are extrordinarily slim. Still, it would be interesting to see the nature of the shit that hit the fan if they did indeed get the key.
What would probably make the most sense is to accentuate expertise in one language with some dabbling in other languages. A lot of places, for example, will look for people that have both Java and C++. Really though what will get you the good jobs is the things beyond raw programming skill. That is:
1) Ability to interact with other humans without scaring them
2) Familiarity with standard processes for developing and documenting development
3) An ability to understand the business needs and realities that impact the code
Code monkeys are cheap and easy to come by, but people with a good head on their shoulders and a breadth of knowledge are what get the good jobs.
Children are not able to fully understand and cope, on their own, with the violence evidences in such games.
Assuming that is a true statement, define children. How old does a child have to be before they can cope? Do we suddenly get granted this magical ability at 18?
Children growing up in an environment where such media violence is taken for granted often take real violence for granted in their life.
Really? Could you show me the scientifically valid survey that prooves this? Because everything I've read has show that the research on the subject is, at best, inconclusive.
The big problem I have with ratings systems and regulation of games, etc, is that it doesn't take into account the fact that children mature at different rates. This is less of an issue with video games because, regardless of rating, the parent can always buy the video game for their child. That's what's important here is the parents right to choose what's okay for their child to see.
I remember parents who wouldn't let their kids listen to Madonna thinking it would corrupt them. That's ridiculous in my opinion, but I fully support that parent's right to make that choice for their kids. As long as video game ratings remain a voluntary advisory system they are all okay in my book.
What I've loathed for a very long time is the movie ratings system. When I was 15, I was mature enough to deal with anything I've ever seen in an R rated movie but I still couldn't go see them in the theater unless my mom really wanted to come sit through it (which did happen on occasion thankfully). She couldn't write me a note of approval, or even just show up to buy me the tickets, she had to sit through the whole damn movie. If she had no desire to see it, I had to wait for video or HBO. The greatest irony was that the strict enforcement in the theaters did nothing to stop me from seeing the movies, it just delayed it.
The thing is that the governments and europe have a much different sense of themselves than here. The government here, for the most part, hates itself. It seems to, at every turn, want to eliminate itself (or at least as much as possible without firing themselves or their buddies). So they look at the RIAA and think that they have the right to own what they've produced and that the government shouldn't interfere with that. This perspective is very distorted, but I digress.
In europe, the government sees itself having a more important and larger role in the lives of the people. Larger social wellfare programs, etc, are all part of that mentaility. This also means that they are less likely to bend to the will of large corporations at a moments whim. Furthermore, let's think about this, it is the RIAA. That second A is for America, and somehow I doubt most european bureaucrats will take kindly to the RIAA trying to dictate terms to them. If nothing else you can count on a general dislike of American hegemony to tilt the game out of the RIAA's favor.
This already exists. Just go play some Magic the Gathering sometime, and you'll see how this operation works. You go out and buy all of these decks of cards and if you get lucky you get good cards, but then if you want to be really good you need to go buy all these out-of-print rare cards from other people.
The major difference is that the buying of those out-of-print rare cards, though a big cost, is at least going to other players. Instead of having the company screw you for all the money you become part of the market, being able to buy and sell these cards.
And you don't have to pay taxes either because it's voluntary! :). riiiiiight
Evolution still works to some extent. If you are gullible enough to believe that you can't be prosecuted if you host kiddie porn on somebody else's server, you will go to jail. It's difficult to propogate your genetic line with your prison bunkmate (though he may try to do so despite your pleas to the contrary), so you will be isolated from the gene pool and society will evolve.
The thing is that we don't have the perspective of history to indicate to us what will have long term relevance. I mean they listed Viagra on there. VIAGRA? I'm sorry, but the ability for an old man to get an erection is not one of the greatest innovations of the last 85 years.
One thing I didn't see on the list was nanotechnology, which is going to hugely impact the future. We're only seeing it in limited ways so far, but 10 or 20 years from now it's going to revolutionize a lot of things. Also, one thing I noticed was that, while a number of inventions like fiber optics were created some time ago, it's only recently that the implementations have borne practical fruit.
One of the primary values of the awards shows for movies and music is that, for the most part, the people who are receiving awards are attractive, or at least interesting to look at. Somehow I don't think the show's going to appeal to much of an audience when the stage is populated by people who can barely survive in sunlight :).
Regardless, it's good to see the videogame industry being recognized for it's impact on the world in a positive way. Most of the time when it gets shown in the public light it's surrounded by phrases like, "graphic violence", and "think of the children".
That's really cool that they are going to release their modifications. There generosity knows no bounds. I mean wow, it's not like the license for the software they are modifying requires them to release those modificaitons... er...
:)
Nevermind...
Don't get me wrong though, this is great news regardless