AOL not all it's cracked up to be
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 2
Hrrrm. I wonder what percentage of the world population has access to television or movie theatres. It's pretty much fair to assume that most, if not all, of these people have, at one point or another, come across some content by Time-Warner. My point is that, compared to TW's numbers, AOL's measly 20M subscribers is virtually nothing - not even a full percent of the world population. (Of course, it's a larger percentage of the more economically representative layers of the world population, but still.)
AOL has been achieving painfully little market penetration since it began doing business here in Brazil, maybe a few months ago. There are literally hundreds of lawsuits pending against AOL-BR for having their free CDs completely reconfigure the host computers, and it seems they're going to lose them. There are already about half a dozen well-established and very powerful ISPs which control a sizeable fraction of the market and aren't letting goal. AOL has yet to manage to strike any significant bundling deal with any of the major OEMs. In general, the press reaction has been very anti-AOL, and a sizeable fraction of the Brazilian computer-using public reads at least the computer section of the major newspapers. Maybe this situation is exclusive to Brazil because of its peculiar situation, but their invasion of the Brazilian market was pretty much a flop.
Finally, I'd like to point out that it seems likely that Internet-related stock is going to drop like crazy very soon (*), and AOL is likely to be very damaged by this.
Here, finally, there should be a conclusion. Unfortunately, I have no actual point, and hence no conclusion to speak of. I just wanted to give you something to think about. As always, draw your own conclusion.
* I know, the Internet trade boom is merely representative to the shift to the information age, stock prices will merely stabilize, economic Darwinism will take its toll, and things will go back to normal, and all that. But the world - and particularly the financial market - tends toward hysteria, and that means that, whether you like it or not, the Internet stock market is eventually going down. (Kaufmann says as he dons his asbestos vest and waits for the flames from the economics experts in Slashdot)
I can see it already. Our kids will grow up with MCPs as role models. That is a very scary notion.
This situation is unacceptable. It's clear that the community must release some action figures that will spark the imagination of our own children (what, you mean you actually got laid? Way to go!). Behold...
The NEW Ultra-Cool CmdrTaco (tm) and Hemos (tm) action figures!
Featuring...
* Automatic misspeller gun! * Rushed duplicated article submission! * Bad joke dispenser! * Nanotech-related story magnet! * Automated Linux kernel updater! * Olympic swimming pool filled with Andover IPO dollars! * Rumour-type-story accuracy checker! (Oh wait, never mind that.)
Although the CmdrTaco (tm) and Hemos (tm) action figures claim to support open-doll development, only an early version of their own schemata is available. How sad is that?
CmdrTaco and Hemos are trademarks of Andover.net. "Don't mess with us or our elephantine legal department will crush you like a bug, little man!"
In related news, godlike jazz pianist Keith Jarrett announced his teaming up with Richard Stallman and Guy Steele to create a new integrated operating system/high-level language called "Concert" (in the tradition of "Scheme", "Planner", "Conniver" and other traditional Lisp-related systems). Reportedly, this system would feature complete model-level reflection, purely functional networking, a complete AI system for proving software correctness on the fly, zero-time automated garbage-collection, a direct telepathic user interface, and an uniform, self-documenting language syntax without any punctuation at all. The system is expected to run on top of no hardware whatsoever by the time of its first release.
Except for hardcore jazz fans or computer scientists, nobody really paid attention. The full sources are available at ftp://ftp.concert.ai.mit.edu/pub/concert/src, but nobody so far has downloaded them.
This is not just any movie. This is Star Wars, Episode I we're talking about here.
It's an icon, a legend, an unreachable goal. It's the thing that's been on the minds of movie geeks everywhere since 1983. Who cares about whether it was a crappy movie? That's hardly relevant - after all, by that same measuring stick, the original trilogy was just about as crappy! That's not the issue at all! The issue is that Star Wars is a cultural icon. It's important. It's news for nerds; it's stuff that matters. It should be on DVD; we should be able to watch every scene from five different angles in a dozen different languages, whether we like it or not.
(About me: I do not, at the present time, own a DVD player of any kind. I'm not a "real" Star Wars nut by any stretch of the definition. I rather enjoyed TPM - except for Jar Jar - and watched it twice. I just really like to rant.)
A few people have asked something along the lines of "doesn't Brooks' Law invalidate Bazaar-style development?" At first, it may seem that way - one of the basic tenets upon which it's based is "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". So could it be that the bazaar doesn't work at all - that maybe the cathedral is the right model after all?
I say not. First of all, one must recognize the difference between the "bazaar" of interested hackers contributing over the Internet in an informal environment, and the "human wave" of countless corporate programmers that characterizes corporate development.
Basically, my point is that what the bazaar is about is not sheer number of developers - even in the most developer-friendly projects, there is usually a shortage of competent developers. It's about openness - allowing other people free access to your code. Corporate human-wave projects, by contrast, abound with NDAs and trade secrets; in a closed environment, Brooks' Law applies strongly and projects with developer overkill tend to go down the drain. But bazaar-style projects suffer less from it - behold Linux, Apache, Perl and other projects that, while open (both in the sense of free code and of welcoming new developers) tend to have a well-defined developer core and a well-organized working scheme.
Morphic is a huge step forward in graphical object-oriented systems. Just great. It was born in SELF, I think, but has been incorporated into UIUC Squeak.
The ultimate fusion of hacker and Berkeley radical. His projects have included Community Memory, the Sol, the Osbourne, the Tom Swift Terminal, the Pennywhistle modem, forerunner of all PC modems. Lee Felsenstein is truly a hero of hardware hacking.
Two others that come to mind are Richard Greenblatt and Guy Steele (both from Lisp country), for more reasons than I can mention.
Of course, other important people are Alonzo Church (inventor of lambda calculus, which pretty much led to everything we call computer science), Uncle John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, which pretty much led to a lot of what we call programming), Marvin Minsky (one of the great AI pioneers), and many more.
Because I'm too lazy to write three separate posts that say essentially the same thing, let me clarify a few things.
First of all, as is made painfully obvious by looking at my email address, I am not in the USA.
Second, people have come to reckon the government as a well-defined, separate entity. This is not the case: "the government" is exactly what you make it out to be. The question is not "can the government tell me what to do?"; rather, it's "when I let the government tell me what to do, to whom am I giving my freedom away?". So whether I agree with the government on this or that is not an issue; I can do whatever the hell I want, and it's not "the government" that might stop me - it's the people. "The government" is merely a convention. "The government" is what everybody makes it out to be.
Third and last, I do not drive. I hate driving, and thankfully I don't have to. But I'm ranting about this anyway. Why? Because I'm a radical libertarian, and that's what we do.
(NOTE for those with Kaufmann-incompatible humour circuitry: The last sentence was a JOKE. Try to take it as such.)
I sincerely hope you're joking. Driving is a privilege that the government has allowed me to have? Since when did the government gain a monopoly over my rights? Last I checked, the government existed to serve the people, not the other way around.
Y'know, I used to have a hearty laugh at User Friendly every day. I even subscribed to the Ufies debate list. I was livin' la vida loca.
But thank the Lord, along came good old Scott Kurtz. He made me see that, in fact, User Friendly isn't funny at all! It's so obvious to me now! It's just not funny!
Let's all pause now and give thanks to Scott Kurtz for enlightening us on what is funny and what isn't.
I'm no expert, but I've been working with the FFTW - "the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West" - and it's really kick-ass fast. I've been wondering what kind of FT algorithm these image-compression guys tend to use. I figure, a faster FT means less time required to compress and decompress data, which in turn means that more detailed data that once was unfeasibly large and slow to process will not cease to be large, but may cease to be slow. May this yield a feasible alternative? FTs are "the workhorse of DSP" - a very well-known and familiar technique. So why not? (I'm sure there's a damn good reason why not...)
First of all, I'd like to say that I intensely dislike this stupid "top ten" nonsense. It reminds me of an anecdote about Enrico Fermi, when he arrived in America around WWII. They told him that somebody or the other was "a great general", to which he replied "what is the definition of a great general?" They figured that it was a general who had won five consecutive battles. He then pointed out that, if all there were no "great generals" and all armies had equal forces, 1/32 - roughly 3% - of all generals would have won five consecutive battles, solely by luck. "Now, has any of them ever won/ten/ consecutive battles...?"
Also, I should point out that, even though Newton might have been a geek, he was by no means "shunned" or "opressed". He was arrogant, ambitious and ruthless. He was Master of the Mint, Fellow of the Royal Society, and very powerful on the political establishment.
None of this means that Newton was not a great man. It just means that he definitely does not fit the "outcast genius" stereotype.
You know what that means, don't you? Article 0551209 of January 01... 00?!?!?!?
Good going, Rob! I hope you're feeling good about yourself. Y'know, I think you should read ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar, in which he points out that "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"... and release the Slash source already!
Hopefully it will culminate in unix dominating the net once again.
So you figure in a few years we'll be listening to users of Windows, PalmOS, BeOS, etc. bitch about all the web sites that are optimized for Konqueror/depend on ELF binaries/whatever, and whine about the Web discriminating against users of non-Unix platforms?
I surely hope not. First of all, because Unix sucks. It does. I'm not joking. Of course, it sucks much less than any given flavour of Windows. But it sucks nonetheless. Again, I'm serious: Unix is at best useable, and still nowhere near being worthy of the adjective "good". So in one way or the other, forcing people to use Unix if they want to have the complete Net experience is about as bad as doing the same with Windows.
What we want is not a Net dominated by Unix. It's an open Net, free of platform boundaries. Bitch as much as you want about Java (I know I do), it's definitely a step in the right direction. So I hope that in a few years an user can access any piece of information he wants, whether he's on a Beowulf cluster, on a workstation, or on an Internet-enabled toaster.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrrrm. I wonder what percentage of the world population has access to television or movie theatres. It's pretty much fair to assume that most, if not all, of these people have, at one point or another, come across some content by Time-Warner. My point is that, compared to TW's numbers, AOL's measly 20M subscribers is virtually nothing - not even a full percent of the world population. (Of course, it's a larger percentage of the more economically representative layers of the world population, but still.)
AOL has been achieving painfully little market penetration since it began doing business here in Brazil, maybe a few months ago. There are literally hundreds of lawsuits pending against AOL-BR for having their free CDs completely reconfigure the host computers, and it seems they're going to lose them. There are already about half a dozen well-established and very powerful ISPs which control a sizeable fraction of the market and aren't letting goal. AOL has yet to manage to strike any significant bundling deal with any of the major OEMs. In general, the press reaction has been very anti-AOL, and a sizeable fraction of the Brazilian computer-using public reads at least the computer section of the major newspapers. Maybe this situation is exclusive to Brazil because of its peculiar situation, but their invasion of the Brazilian market was pretty much a flop.
Finally, I'd like to point out that it seems likely that Internet-related stock is going to drop like crazy very soon (*), and AOL is likely to be very damaged by this.
Here, finally, there should be a conclusion. Unfortunately, I have no actual point, and hence no conclusion to speak of. I just wanted to give you something to think about. As always, draw your own conclusion.
* I know, the Internet trade boom is merely representative to the shift to the information age, stock prices will merely stabilize, economic Darwinism will take its toll, and things will go back to normal, and all that. But the world - and particularly the financial market - tends toward hysteria, and that means that, whether you like it or not, the Internet stock market is eventually going down. (Kaufmann says as he dons his asbestos vest and waits for the flames from the economics experts in Slashdot)
Seriously, is there any project around for trying to run a bunch of these little boxen together in a big-ass cluster? Now that would be cool.
(Not Troll. Not Offtopic. Not Flamebait. Just a random though.)
I can see it already. Our kids will grow up with MCPs as role models. That is a very scary notion.
This situation is unacceptable. It's clear that the community must release some action figures that will spark the imagination of our own children (what, you mean you actually got laid? Way to go!). Behold...
The NEW Ultra-Cool CmdrTaco (tm) and Hemos (tm) action figures!
Featuring...
* Automatic misspeller gun!
* Rushed duplicated article submission!
* Bad joke dispenser!
* Nanotech-related story magnet!
* Automated Linux kernel updater!
* Olympic swimming pool filled with Andover IPO dollars!
* Rumour-type-story accuracy checker! (Oh wait, never mind that.)
Although the CmdrTaco (tm) and Hemos (tm) action figures claim to support open-doll development, only an early version of their own schemata is available. How sad is that?
CmdrTaco and Hemos are trademarks of Andover.net. "Don't mess with us or our elephantine legal department will crush you like a bug, little man!"
In related news, godlike jazz pianist Keith Jarrett announced his teaming up with Richard Stallman and Guy Steele to create a new integrated operating system/high-level language called "Concert" (in the tradition of "Scheme", "Planner", "Conniver" and other traditional Lisp-related systems). Reportedly, this system would feature complete model-level reflection, purely functional networking, a complete AI system for proving software correctness on the fly, zero-time automated garbage-collection, a direct telepathic user interface, and an uniform, self-documenting language syntax without any punctuation at all. The system is expected to run on top of no hardware whatsoever by the time of its first release.
Except for hardcore jazz fans or computer scientists, nobody really paid attention. The full sources are available at ftp://ftp.concert.ai.mit.edu/pub/concert/src, but nobody so far has downloaded them.
You don't understand.
This is not just any movie. This is Star Wars, Episode I we're talking about here.
It's an icon, a legend, an unreachable goal. It's the thing that's been on the minds of movie geeks everywhere since 1983. Who cares about whether it was a crappy movie? That's hardly relevant - after all, by that same measuring stick, the original trilogy was just about as crappy! That's not the issue at all! The issue is that Star Wars is a cultural icon. It's important. It's news for nerds; it's stuff that matters. It should be on DVD; we should be able to watch every scene from five different angles in a dozen different languages, whether we like it or not.
(About me: I do not, at the present time, own a DVD player of any kind. I'm not a "real" Star Wars nut by any stretch of the definition. I rather enjoyed TPM - except for Jar Jar - and watched it twice. I just really like to rant.)
A few people have asked something along the lines of "doesn't Brooks' Law invalidate Bazaar-style development?" At first, it may seem that way - one of the basic tenets upon which it's based is "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". So could it be that the bazaar doesn't work at all - that maybe the cathedral is the right model after all?
I say not. First of all, one must recognize the difference between the "bazaar" of interested hackers contributing over the Internet in an informal environment, and the "human wave" of countless corporate programmers that characterizes corporate development.
Basically, my point is that what the bazaar is about is not sheer number of developers - even in the most developer-friendly projects, there is usually a shortage of competent developers. It's about openness - allowing other people free access to your code. Corporate human-wave projects, by contrast, abound with NDAs and trade secrets; in a closed environment, Brooks' Law applies strongly and projects with developer overkill tend to go down the drain. But bazaar-style projects suffer less from it - behold Linux, Apache, Perl and other projects that, while open (both in the sense of free code and of welcoming new developers) tend to have a well-defined developer core and a well-organized working scheme.
Morphic is a huge step forward in graphical object-oriented systems. Just great. It was born in SELF, I think, but has been incorporated into UIUC Squeak.
Okay, so it's not strictly one book, and it's not directly open source-related, but who cares? TAOCP is the computer science book, and that's that.
This message brought to you by Kaufmann: advocating extremely liberal use of HTML tags on Slashdot for a year and a half now.
The ultimate fusion of hacker and Berkeley radical. His projects have included Community Memory, the Sol, the Osbourne, the Tom Swift Terminal, the Pennywhistle modem, forerunner of all PC modems. Lee Felsenstein is truly a hero of hardware hacking.
Two others that come to mind are Richard Greenblatt and Guy Steele (both from Lisp country), for more reasons than I can mention.
Of course, other important people are Alonzo Church (inventor of lambda calculus, which pretty much led to everything we call computer science), Uncle John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, which pretty much led to a lot of what we call programming), Marvin Minsky (one of the great AI pioneers), and many more.
On osOpinion... OS X on x86.
CGIwrap Error: Script is not executable. Issue chmod 755 /www/home/recordstore.com/cgi-bin/wuname/wuname.pl
(If this was already mentioned in another post, sorry.)
Because I'm too lazy to write three separate posts that say essentially the same thing, let me clarify a few things.
First of all, as is made painfully obvious by looking at my email address, I am not in the USA.
Second, people have come to reckon the government as a well-defined, separate entity. This is not the case: "the government" is exactly what you make it out to be. The question is not "can the government tell me what to do?"; rather, it's "when I let the government tell me what to do, to whom am I giving my freedom away?". So whether I agree with the government on this or that is not an issue; I can do whatever the hell I want, and it's not "the government" that might stop me - it's the people. "The government" is merely a convention. "The government" is what everybody makes it out to be.
Third and last, I do not drive. I hate driving, and thankfully I don't have to. But I'm ranting about this anyway. Why? Because I'm a radical libertarian, and that's what we do.
(NOTE for those with Kaufmann-incompatible humour circuitry: The last sentence was a JOKE. Try to take it as such.)
I sincerely hope you're joking. Driving is a privilege that the government has allowed me to have? Since when did the government gain a monopoly over my rights? Last I checked, the government existed to serve the people, not the other way around.
Yet
Another
Uri
Geller
Lawsuit
Story
Pokemon sux
Pokemon rox
Pokemon sux rox
I wonder what a Beowulf cluster of Uri Gellers would be like...
[Insert your favourite "there is no spoon" quote here]
[Insert your favourite Natalie Portman naked and petrified nonsense here]
Et cetera, ad nauseam. There, I've done it for you. Now you can go home.
Y'know, I used to have a hearty laugh at User Friendly every day. I even subscribed to the Ufies debate list. I was livin' la vida loca.
But thank the Lord, along came good old Scott Kurtz. He made me see that, in fact, User Friendly isn't funny at all! It's so obvious to me now! It's just not funny!
Let's all pause now and give thanks to Scott Kurtz for enlightening us on what is funny and what isn't.
More poets in here?
If it's haikus that you want
I have got plenty.
(Here are some...)
Morning smiles upon
Post-2K community
The gods let us live.
Redmond upon us
The bloatware makes me shiver
I fear Win2K.
Linux is not bad
Free if time has no value
Should be preinstalled.
Pheer the cracker kid
Chats on AOL all night
He is true 31337.
See the Redmond Beast
Its vapourware is worthless
One more promise.
C++ sucks ass
Although I need my paycheck
I wish Bjarne was dead.
Yeah, I know. I read the article. I was just thinking out loud. Sorry :)
I'm no expert, but I've been working with the FFTW - "the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West" - and it's really kick-ass fast. I've been wondering what kind of FT algorithm these image-compression guys tend to use. I figure, a faster FT means less time required to compress and decompress data, which in turn means that more detailed data that once was unfeasibly large and slow to process will not cease to be large, but may cease to be slow. May this yield a feasible alternative? FTs are "the workhorse of DSP" - a very well-known and familiar technique. So why not? (I'm sure there's a damn good reason why not...)
First of all, I'd like to say that I intensely dislike this stupid "top ten" nonsense. It reminds me of an anecdote about Enrico Fermi, when he arrived in America around WWII. They told him that somebody or the other was "a great general", to which he replied "what is the definition of a great general?" They figured that it was a general who had won five consecutive battles. He then pointed out that, if all there were no "great generals" and all armies had equal forces, 1/32 - roughly 3% - of all generals would have won five consecutive battles, solely by luck. "Now, has any of them ever won /ten/ consecutive battles...?"
Also, I should point out that, even though Newton might have been a geek, he was by no means "shunned" or "opressed". He was arrogant, ambitious and ruthless. He was Master of the Mint, Fellow of the Royal Society, and very powerful on the political establishment.
None of this means that Newton was not a great man. It just means that he definitely does not fit the "outcast genius" stereotype.
Yeah, that's right. Look at the values for the articles.pl query-string. It reads
0 9&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/01/05512
You know what that means, don't you? Article 0551209 of January 01... 00?!?!?!?
Good going, Rob! I hope you're feeling good about yourself. Y'know, I think you should read ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar, in which he points out that "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"... and release the Slash source already!
When did "Mghtz" become a widely accepted abbreviation for "Megahertz"? The standard is "MHz".
Hopefully it will culminate in unix dominating the net once again.
So you figure in a few years we'll be listening to users of Windows, PalmOS, BeOS, etc. bitch about all the web sites that are optimized for Konqueror/depend on ELF binaries/whatever, and whine about the Web discriminating against users of non-Unix platforms?
I surely hope not. First of all, because Unix sucks. It does. I'm not joking. Of course, it sucks much less than any given flavour of Windows. But it sucks nonetheless. Again, I'm serious: Unix is at best useable, and still nowhere near being worthy of the adjective "good". So in one way or the other, forcing people to use Unix if they want to have the complete Net experience is about as bad as doing the same with Windows.
What we want is not a Net dominated by Unix. It's an open Net, free of platform boundaries. Bitch as much as you want about Java (I know I do), it's definitely a step in the right direction. So I hope that in a few years an user can access any piece of information he wants, whether he's on a Beowulf cluster, on a workstation, or on an Internet-enabled toaster.
Yep, yer right. I actually don't use Python very often myself... sorry about that. It runs now, though, right? :)
Following the suggestion, here are a few ports of the above program to some popular languages (substitute underscores for spaces when obvious):
:P
* Scheme
(let ((rand-elt
___________(lambda (l)
________________(list-ref l (round (rand (length l))))))
______(prefix '(Pent It Max Ath Cort Trit))
______(suffix '(ium alon ex anium oricon agon))
______(tag '(II III IV Pro MMX Deluxe)))
_____(begin
__________(display (rand-elt prefix))
__________(display (rand-elt suffix))
__________(display (rand-elt tag))
__________(newline)))
* Python
def rand_elt(list):
____list[int(rand(len(list)))]
prefix = ["Pent", "It", "Max", "Ath", "Cort", "Trit"]
suffix = ["ium", "alon", "ex", "anium" "oricon", "agon"]
tag = ["II", "III", "IV", "Pro", "MMX", "Deluxe"]
s = rand_elt(prefix) + ' ' + rand_elt(suffix) + ' ' + rand_elt(tag) + '\n'
print s
That's all for now... I seem to have run out of creativity
1. It's the other way around. "it's" is short for "it is"; "its" is the possessive pronoun.
:)
2. The blurb clearly implied that the PDF format was Compaq's.
3. I had nothing good to say about the article