Can you name a situation where utility or railroad rights were purchased with "emminent domain"?
Besides when Indian land was given to the railroads, that is.
The only time eminent domain purchases are common is highway projects and some urban redevelopment projects (where lots need to be consolidated or decontaminated).
Anyway, it's always amusing to see some redneck moaning about "his" property when he appararently hasn't (or can't) read the deed to determine exactly what property rights he does or does not own.
Re:Jeez, where should I start ranting?
on
Make Way for Fiber
·
· Score: 2
The article portrays this as an issue of "surface" versus "subsurface", but I doubt it's that simple.
I know for a fact that some railroads only purchased the rights to operate a (surface) railroad over the land in question, with the original property owner holding all remaining rights, even though it's difficult to do anything with land with a railroad on it. Thus, when the railroad ceases operation, plans to turn the land into a bike path or whatever fall to pieces. In some cases the land even reverts to the original Indian tribe which controlled the land.
Now, it's one thing to operate a underground railroad telephone network. It's entirely another to run telco cable. My guess is that's the issue there, but without more facts there's no use spinning up the anal distinction gizmo.
I'm going to bet that the telcos will file a lawsuit for fraud against the railways.
In certain cases (Sprint and Qwest), the telco was a spin-off of the railway with the only asset being the cable rights. (Actually, Qwest was more complicated than that, the railroad was spun off from the telco which took it over to get the cable rights.)
If it turned out those rights didn't exist, the lawsuits could be huge between these companies, not to mention investor lawsuits if it comes out that the entire premise of the company (cable rights) was mis-stated. No wonder everyone's keeping quiet.
As far as I know, highways are never built on an easement (as some railroads apparently were), but instead the state owns the land underneath and therefore can do with it what they will.
Now, if you check your property deed and it says "Electric Co. has an easmement to string powerlines across your land", wouldn't you be a little concerned whey they started burying fiber (thus inhibiting certain development),building a pipeline, or a road for Electric Co trucks? No, you'd probably write it off as "lawyer bullshit" and let Electric Co steal your land.
Nautilus is based on a component-style design. Components are one very good way to achive the 'many small tools' rule that Unix users want out of a GUI system.
Ironically, Microsoft understood this problem and achived a workable solution with COM around 10 years ago. Most VisualBasic programmers, for example, are just providing glue for other people's components.
In the open source world, the idea has started to catch on. However, this has brought at least 4 different, incompatible component models (Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and StarOffice). Unlike the aethetic or configuration issues with Unix Widget Wars, this is a *real* problem because it prevents interoperability between different component environments. And 90% of the problem is petty politics.
(As for Nautilus - Unfortuately, despite early adverts that it would fit on a floppy disk, the Mozilla component ended up being a 10MB+ download. Meanwhile, MSHTML.DLL is 2.7MB.)
I actually think it's the inhouse and vertical market applications that are a larger hinderence than the general applications.
Most of the world managed the WordPerfect to Word transition. However, they are often still running the same inhouse apps from the WordPerfect days (and worse, have built automation solutons on MS Office which aren't so easy to replicate elsewhere)
I'm in the consulting business had a laptop on my shoulder for the last 5 years. Those 2 pounds make a difference. Another thing learned in consulting is to not ignore user requirements (such as the parent's 5 pound requirement).
Not that I would or could use a Mac, but is nice to see someone break the normal cost/weight equasion in this market (as in, weight is the primary upsell for laptops, and a 7 pounder is pretty much bottom of the market).
I tried buying one of those, but it was horrifically malaligned to the point of instantaneous headache. IBM was nice enough to pay for return shipping though (even though it was from their surplus department), so I sucked it up and bought a P260. Glad you got lucky on yours.
Taco had a problem: lots of crapflooding and noise that the user moderation system couldn't filter out. Sure, there was administrative moderation, but who was going to read thorough the thousands of posts to use it.
The solution was to find someone that was absolutely facist about free speech and could be bothered to want to make judgements about all the stupid anonymous and offtopic postings here. Sims apparently fit the bill according to the accounts, so Taco hired him.
The end result is that anonymous posting is pretty much been systematically eliminated. You can still do it (there's that nice checkbox), but you're likely to end up at -1 Offtopic no matter how on-topic you are. Why this is necessary, given the viewing threshold system, is unknown.
I'm downstream from above.net, and I'm fully behind them on this.
I almost feel sorry for the small time trailerpark crowd trying to sell me diplomas or CDs full of e-mail addresses. It's the mainstream spamming which must be simply absolutely not tolerated on the Internet, and I'm glad that there's powerful forces fighting it.
If it becomes acceptable for reputable companies such as Macromedia (or EA or eBay to name a few perpetrators) to spam, do you really think there's any hope stopping bubba19023@hotmail.com from flooding your inbox with MAKE MONY FAST?
Windows allows you to assign shortcut key sequences to anything on the Start Menu. So the Windows key itself is sorta irrelevant. (On my PS/2 keyboarded winbox, I have Ctrl+Alt+M setup to minimize all windows.)
Look on eBay for an "IBM TrackPoint II" keyboard, which is an old skool clickity Model M keyboard with a clit. Comes in white and black.
(I highly recommend it because it's helped my wrists a ton, primarily due to the mechanical action, but also because the trackpoint is good enough for minor web mousing without moving your hand. Only problem is that scroll mice don't work with the PS/2 passthru, so if you want both a trackpoint and a fancy mouse, make sure the mouse is USB.)
Those were truely the worst pointing device ever. (Really, holding your arm up in the air with your thumb on this tiny little ball while trying to push those buttons on the back of the lid! Shudder.)
But strangely, they seemed to attract some geeks. When some of our users finally got the new laptops they were crying for, a few of the IT guys were fighting over those old things.
If Apple can make higher profits from the monitors because of an exclusive supplier deal, or discourage more people from buying a 3rd party monitor because of a sexy flatpanel, they may lower the price the computers, even if the cost of the total computer package is higher.
Same story for a company like Dell, which is why Dell now ships Trinitrons instead of the crap they shipped a few years ago. Sony obviously runs their Monitor and Computer divisions seperately.
The connector consipracy here is to prevent owners of non-Apple computers from buying the Apple monitors. $2500 for a 22" flat panel display is not a bad deal, but then you have to find a DVI-to-ADC adapter. ($149 was the cheapest I found, but they were not available for a long while).
Spend some time in front of a Flat Triniton tube ($575 for a 19" IBM P96, for example), and get back to us about that KDS.
Of course it depends on if you are looking at your monitor 8+ hours a day versus a couple, and how much $325 is worth to you. Personally for me, what's been considered a "good enough" monitor in standard PC space tends to be pretty terrible, and KDC's I've seen were certainly not an exception.
The original IBM/MS standard was Shift+Delete, Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert. Horrible, but still mostly supported in Windows.
Apple had a alternate standard of F1/F2/F3, which was very nice for mouse-oriented tasks such as drawing programs. Too bad it was never widely supported, even on MacOS.
I basically quit playing Civ I because the AI cheats were so bad. (Spearchucker somehow blows up my bomber, next turn Zulus have mysteriously gained a 1000 years of tech and constructed a bomber themselves.)
From what I've read, CivII and Alpha Centuri weren't much better despite the 100 fold increase in computational power. Not that I really have time for this shit anymore.
Re:MS Tactic to end reverse-engineering?
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 3
I guess it comes down to what the terms of the source licensing agreement are, and who it's available to. In the past, Microsoft has used source licenses to pick winners in certain product categories and has been sued over that practice.
Excluding "secret API" FUD, your description of Office development are the exact practices that Corel and Lotus have complained about for many years. You can tune your product using OS source, they can't. Will they be able to under "shared source"? Will (say) an IBM developer working on a juicy piece of middleware that MS wants supported on Windows be forbidden to transfer to the Lotus division?
I guess it really comes down to if "shared source" is something new, or just a continuance of MS's existing source license policies.
I am not here to refer a large nameless group of people as "idoits"
No you're here to call a large nameless group "brain washed Microfoft (sic) drones".
You seem possessed of the rather ridiculous idea that operating systems can "rise" and "fall", or be used or rejected by large segments of the operating system purchasing market, due to flamewars on technology discussion sites like this one
Actually that's the exact idea I'm attacking. Calling your competitors a "threat" is an example of that sort of thinking. The lesson of OS/2 is that a looney fringe *can* hurt a platform's prospects, and that's exactly the tune that Mundie is playing.
Last year Microsoft stated that Sun was it's #1 threat. Have they given up or just lowered their sites? Neither -- they want to *expand* their marketshare by progressively eating away Unix-dominated segments.
Thinking of it as a "threat" is the paranoid looney take, and most Linux advocacy folks have gone there. "Market opportunity" is the way too look it.
And writing me off as a "drone" is not only factually incorrect, it's completely unfair and completely stupid. Great fucking way to sell your product.
I just don't want to sit here and watch another group of idiots blow their whole fucking leg off trying to flamewar Microsoft as the OS/2 guys did. Learn your fucking lesson or perish. There's even a HOW-TO. Read it.
Microsoft largely didn't have to FUD OS/2, because IBM was perfectly capabable of fux0ring the product themselves. (The fucking thing didn't even include networking support until about 1995! And, No, SNA doesn't count!) Of course that didn't stop the Teamers from imagining all sorts of conspiritorial slights.
This attitude has translated over to the Linux community. People post all the time about how Microsoft is "scared" of Linux. Which is completely untrue, as MS is fighting an offensive battle to gain ground in the webserver/database markets that had traditionally been owned by Unix. The day they start moaning about losing fileserver seats to Samba is the day they're on the defensive, but that hasn't happened yet.
But yeah yeah, Stephen Bartko, one propaganda page at microsoft.com. Blah blah whatever. Don't learn your lesson and keep fighting the demons in your own head. It's just another defensive battle which you will lose.
Re:Who's made the model work?
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
I'm fully aware of the research stuff that IBM is doing using Open Source.
It just amazes me how a big, traditional, closed-source firm can make a couple minor adjustments and spray Linux ads on the sidewalk and you folks just flock to them. Don't think for a second that they wouldn't rather sell you an AS/400.
Re:Who's made the model work?
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
When did IBM switch to open source?
Oh, you mean that they now bolt on Apache instead of an inhouse web server to their expensive middleware products? Or they wrote some drivers so that Linux can be a second tier citizen on some of their hardware? Or what exactly?
Slashdot Mirror
Can you name a situation where utility or railroad rights were purchased with "emminent domain"?
Besides when Indian land was given to the railroads, that is.
The only time eminent domain purchases are common is highway projects and some urban redevelopment projects (where lots need to be consolidated or decontaminated).
Anyway, it's always amusing to see some redneck moaning about "his" property when he appararently hasn't (or can't) read the deed to determine exactly what property rights he does or does not own.
The article portrays this as an issue of "surface" versus "subsurface", but I doubt it's that simple.
I know for a fact that some railroads only purchased the rights to operate a (surface) railroad over the land in question, with the original property owner holding all remaining rights, even though it's difficult to do anything with land with a railroad on it. Thus, when the railroad ceases operation, plans to turn the land into a bike path or whatever fall to pieces. In some cases the land even reverts to the original Indian tribe which controlled the land.
Now, it's one thing to operate a underground railroad telephone network. It's entirely another to run telco cable. My guess is that's the issue there, but without more facts there's no use spinning up the anal distinction gizmo.
I'm going to bet that the telcos will file a lawsuit for fraud against the railways.
In certain cases (Sprint and Qwest), the telco was a spin-off of the railway with the only asset being the cable rights. (Actually, Qwest was more complicated than that, the railroad was spun off from the telco which took it over to get the cable rights.)
If it turned out those rights didn't exist, the lawsuits could be huge between these companies, not to mention investor lawsuits if it comes out that the entire premise of the company (cable rights) was mis-stated. No wonder everyone's keeping quiet.
As far as I know, highways are never built on an easement (as some railroads apparently were), but instead the state owns the land underneath and therefore can do with it what they will.
Now, if you check your property deed and it says "Electric Co. has an easmement to string powerlines across your land", wouldn't you be a little concerned whey they started burying fiber (thus inhibiting certain development),building a pipeline, or a road for Electric Co trucks? No, you'd probably write it off as "lawyer bullshit" and let Electric Co steal your land.
Nautilus is based on a component-style design. Components are one very good way to achive the 'many small tools' rule that Unix users want out of a GUI system.
Ironically, Microsoft understood this problem and achived a workable solution with COM around 10 years ago. Most VisualBasic programmers, for example, are just providing glue for other people's components.
In the open source world, the idea has started to catch on. However, this has brought at least 4 different, incompatible component models (Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and StarOffice). Unlike the aethetic or configuration issues with Unix Widget Wars, this is a *real* problem because it prevents interoperability between different component environments. And 90% of the problem is petty politics.
(As for Nautilus - Unfortuately, despite early adverts that it would fit on a floppy disk, the Mozilla component ended up being a 10MB+ download. Meanwhile, MSHTML.DLL is 2.7MB.)
I actually think it's the inhouse and vertical market applications that are a larger hinderence than the general applications.
Most of the world managed the WordPerfect to Word transition. However, they are often still running the same inhouse apps from the WordPerfect days (and worse, have built automation solutons on MS Office which aren't so easy to replicate elsewhere)
I'm in the consulting business had a laptop on my shoulder for the last 5 years. Those 2 pounds make a difference. Another thing learned in consulting is to not ignore user requirements (such as the parent's 5 pound requirement).
Not that I would or could use a Mac, but is nice to see someone break the normal cost/weight equasion in this market (as in, weight is the primary upsell for laptops, and a 7 pounder is pretty much bottom of the market).
I tried buying one of those, but it was horrifically malaligned to the point of instantaneous headache. IBM was nice enough to pay for return shipping though (even though it was from their surplus department), so I sucked it up and bought a P260. Glad you got lucky on yours.
Taco had a problem: lots of crapflooding and noise that the user moderation system couldn't filter out. Sure, there was administrative moderation, but who was going to read thorough the thousands of posts to use it.
The solution was to find someone that was absolutely facist about free speech and could be bothered to want to make judgements about all the stupid anonymous and offtopic postings here. Sims apparently fit the bill according to the accounts, so Taco hired him.
The end result is that anonymous posting is pretty much been systematically eliminated. You can still do it (there's that nice checkbox), but you're likely to end up at -1 Offtopic no matter how on-topic you are. Why this is necessary, given the viewing threshold system, is unknown.
I'm downstream from above.net, and I'm fully behind them on this.
I almost feel sorry for the small time trailerpark crowd trying to sell me diplomas or CDs full of e-mail addresses. It's the mainstream spamming which must be simply absolutely not tolerated on the Internet, and I'm glad that there's powerful forces fighting it.
If it becomes acceptable for reputable companies such as Macromedia (or EA or eBay to name a few perpetrators) to spam, do you really think there's any hope stopping bubba19023@hotmail.com from flooding your inbox with MAKE MONY FAST?
Windows allows you to assign shortcut key sequences to anything on the Start Menu. So the Windows key itself is sorta irrelevant. (On my PS/2 keyboarded winbox, I have Ctrl+Alt+M setup to minimize all windows.)
Look on eBay for an "IBM TrackPoint II" keyboard, which is an old skool clickity Model M keyboard with a clit. Comes in white and black.
(I highly recommend it because it's helped my wrists a ton, primarily due to the mechanical action, but also because the trackpoint is good enough for minor web mousing without moving your hand. Only problem is that scroll mice don't work with the PS/2 passthru, so if you want both a trackpoint and a fancy mouse, make sure the mouse is USB.)
Those were truely the worst pointing device ever. (Really, holding your arm up in the air with your thumb on this tiny little ball while trying to push those buttons on the back of the lid! Shudder.)
But strangely, they seemed to attract some geeks. When some of our users finally got the new laptops they were crying for, a few of the IT guys were fighting over those old things.
If Apple can make higher profits from the monitors because of an exclusive supplier deal, or discourage more people from buying a 3rd party monitor because of a sexy flatpanel, they may lower the price the computers, even if the cost of the total computer package is higher.
Same story for a company like Dell, which is why Dell now ships Trinitrons instead of the crap they shipped a few years ago. Sony obviously runs their Monitor and Computer divisions seperately.
The connector consipracy here is to prevent owners of non-Apple computers from buying the Apple monitors. $2500 for a 22" flat panel display is not a bad deal, but then you have to find a DVI-to-ADC adapter. ($149 was the cheapest I found, but they were not available for a long while).
Too bad it weighs 6.9 lbs, so you lose.
(BTW, I had to dig quite a bit at Toshiba's site to find this information, which is their way of saying IT'S HEAVY.)
Spend some time in front of a Flat Triniton tube ($575 for a 19" IBM P96, for example), and get back to us about that KDS.
Of course it depends on if you are looking at your monitor 8+ hours a day versus a couple, and how much $325 is worth to you. Personally for me, what's been considered a "good enough" monitor in standard PC space tends to be pretty terrible, and KDC's I've seen were certainly not an exception.
The original IBM/MS standard was Shift+Delete, Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert. Horrible, but still mostly supported in Windows.
Apple had a alternate standard of F1/F2/F3, which was very nice for mouse-oriented tasks such as drawing programs. Too bad it was never widely supported, even on MacOS.
I basically quit playing Civ I because the AI cheats were so bad. (Spearchucker somehow blows up my bomber, next turn Zulus have mysteriously gained a 1000 years of tech and constructed a bomber themselves.)
From what I've read, CivII and Alpha Centuri weren't much better despite the 100 fold increase in computational power. Not that I really have time for this shit anymore.
I guess it comes down to what the terms of the source licensing agreement are, and who it's available to. In the past, Microsoft has used source licenses to pick winners in certain product categories and has been sued over that practice.
Excluding "secret API" FUD, your description of Office development are the exact practices that Corel and Lotus have complained about for many years. You can tune your product using OS source, they can't. Will they be able to under "shared source"? Will (say) an IBM developer working on a juicy piece of middleware that MS wants supported on Windows be forbidden to transfer to the Lotus division?
I guess it really comes down to if "shared source" is something new, or just a continuance of MS's existing source license policies.
I am not here to refer a large nameless group of people as "idoits"
No you're here to call a large nameless group "brain washed Microfoft (sic) drones".
You seem possessed of the rather ridiculous idea that operating systems can "rise" and "fall", or be used or rejected by large segments of the operating system purchasing market, due to flamewars on technology discussion sites like this one
Actually that's the exact idea I'm attacking. Calling your competitors a "threat" is an example of that sort of thinking. The lesson of OS/2 is that a looney fringe *can* hurt a platform's prospects, and that's exactly the tune that Mundie is playing.
Last year Microsoft stated that Sun was it's #1 threat. Have they given up or just lowered their sites? Neither -- they want to *expand* their marketshare by progressively eating away Unix-dominated segments.
Thinking of it as a "threat" is the paranoid looney take, and most Linux advocacy folks have gone there. "Market opportunity" is the way too look it.
And writing me off as a "drone" is not only factually incorrect, it's completely unfair and completely stupid. Great fucking way to sell your product.
I just don't want to sit here and watch another group of idiots blow their whole fucking leg off trying to flamewar Microsoft as the OS/2 guys did. Learn your fucking lesson or perish. There's even a HOW-TO. Read it.
Microsoft largely didn't have to FUD OS/2, because IBM was perfectly capabable of fux0ring the product themselves. (The fucking thing didn't even include networking support until about 1995! And, No, SNA doesn't count!) Of course that didn't stop the Teamers from imagining all sorts of conspiritorial slights.
This attitude has translated over to the Linux community. People post all the time about how Microsoft is "scared" of Linux. Which is completely untrue, as MS is fighting an offensive battle to gain ground in the webserver/database markets that had traditionally been owned by Unix. The day they start moaning about losing fileserver seats to Samba is the day they're on the defensive, but that hasn't happened yet.
But yeah yeah, Stephen Bartko, one propaganda page at microsoft.com. Blah blah whatever. Don't learn your lesson and keep fighting the demons in your own head. It's just another defensive battle which you will lose.
I'm fully aware of the research stuff that IBM is doing using Open Source.
It just amazes me how a big, traditional, closed-source firm can make a couple minor adjustments and spray Linux ads on the sidewalk and you folks just flock to them. Don't think for a second that they wouldn't rather sell you an AS/400.
When did IBM switch to open source?
Oh, you mean that they now bolt on Apache instead of an inhouse web server to their expensive middleware products? Or they wrote some drivers so that Linux can be a second tier citizen on some of their hardware? Or what exactly?