But world leaders, journalists, and political scientists who tout the Internet as a powerful force for political change are just as wrong as the dot-com enthusiasts who not so long ago believed the Web would completely transform business.
This is a classic example of a writer who had an agenda first, and then sought to write a story to back it up. The whole article is bogus.
The Internet HAS completely transformed business. It has become a major source of a variety of political discussion and activism. Anyone who has been paying attention can see that.
The mainstream political/business publications are resistant to anything which upsets the existing delicate balance, so they often hold new technology (i.e. things they don't understand, or can't control, or can't profit from based on the way they've been leveraging their power and control) to ridiculous, unrealistic standards.
So if we put Internet kiosks in a communist country and the regime doesn't topple in six months, that's a failure of the Internet? Get real!
I know this is nothing new, but am I the only one who doesn't see this new mingling of promotion and editorial which seems to now be totally dominant? An entity "proclaims" something IS the way it IS. Never mind coming up with a realistic explanation. Most people have such short attention spans they don't check the facts or read between the lines.
The last time I was in Vegas I walked into a Burger King and there was a TIP JAR AT THE REGISTER! That to me, epitomizes Vegas. What am I tipping the guy behind the register in a Burger King for? Giving me correct change?
When I used to go to Comdex in Vegas every year, I had a bunch of local friends who used to really despise this convention, the largest ever in Vegas, because apparently the "tech people" didn't gamble. Why? Because they were smart and they knew the odds.
Gambling is basically a tax on poor, dumb people that benefits rich entities. It promotes a something-for-nothing, perverse work ethic.
Now you might say, what about all these dot-com millionaires that are now showing up on the World Poker tour? They're not playing against the house; they're playing against the other players - there's definitely more skill and talent there than pulling the arm of a slot machine.
Personally, I don't really care one way or another. Gambling is just another diversion. I would prefer it not in my community, nor online, but if people want to blow their money, it's their choice. I do worry sometimes about the bad message this says to society that they can "strike it rich" without really having to work hard.
Fair enough. But if there's karma in the world, you'll be much more inconvenienced when EV1 starts screwing over their customers as their business tanks.
Someone coming out and admitting he made a mistake, but at the time was trying to do the best for his company deserves respect. We need more people like that in the industry!
I know a guy in Nigeria that would really like to conduct business with you. Drop me your e-mail so I can forward his offer to you. He seems really down to earth and sincere as well. Your type of guy.
Robert thought that he could explain that to the anti-SCO folks, but apparently those people didn't want to listen to him.
Nobody's not listening to him. We hear him loud and clear. All 1000 watts of spineless waffling.
This reminds me of Kevin Mitnik's comments on what happened when he first entered prison. Someone took some of his stuff, and it was a big, burley guy, but he knew he had to fight him. He got his ass kicked but he knew if he let the bully take his stuff, he'd be marked as a "bitch" and forever persecuted. EV1 is da'bitch now.
Can we take advantage of this issue to get some of EV1's competition to come forward and state they will give EV1's customers a better deal and help migrate them over? Along with a pledge they won't pander to SCO's obnoxious extortion?
If the mafia shows up in your town and everyone else refuses to pay for their "protection", and one business does, they are your enemy. Hindsight doesn't mean anything in this case. EV1 screwed up and choose the wrong side. Anybody who cares about open source needs to make an example of them for their bad judgement and not do any business with EV1. It's a necessity in order to clearly delineate what we feel is right and wrong. Cowards who give aid to the IP Nazis are no better than the IP Nazis themselves.
We cannot condone their actions, no matter how much their people grovel and admit their mistakes. You can bet if the community didn't boycott them, they wouldn't even be waffling like this. Serves 'em right. EV1 is history. Maybe the next provider will think twice about turning their back on the community that helped make them.
"New hammer promises to change the way homes are built"
It's all about the software. The box is irrelevent. Not that people would know this nowadays because software seems to have taken a back seat to hardware development, but there may come a time where a title will be so innovative that whatever platform it's on will be THE platform. Until then, the whole industry is in a big circle-jerk feeding the populace more hardware with little or no real improvement.
Thats quite true, and I agree with you on most of the aspects, but it WILL force the other companies to get their acts together or end up outof business.
I don't think that Google has exactly been sitting on its laurels. They've continued to innovate. Not all companies that have market share (in a competitive market) aren't aggressively trying to innovate. eBay is another example.
However, this approach has never been Microsoft's business model. Microsoft puts other companies out of business and has a tendency of stifling innovation. A good example is in the anti-virus business. All the software companies out there are more-or-less spending their energy trying to figure out how to make their user's dependent upon them in fear that MS will bundle antivirus software in their next major OS release and put them out of business.
MS doesn't "enter" a market. It hijacks it. Nobody's motivated to compete with a company who doesn't do so on a level playing field.
Since when has Microsoft EVER fostered ANY innovation?
Their idea of entering the search engine business will not involve innovation. It will involve them exploiting their monopoly browser market share to force users to patronize their proprietary search engine.
I only came up with this idea a year ago, and have been aggressively promoting it on slashdot, but a new TLD would be useless. No self-respecting mail system can afford to shut out all other domains in such a trusted system. The whitelist system needs to be applied to the Internet proper, with SMTP licensing. Now if spamhaus wants to limit just SMTP relays for.mail, that follows my plan, but ALL users should subsidize the effort and not just the domain holders... that's not fair as it would really be the general populace that would benefit from a whitelisted SMTP network.
Reason #4,582 why DirecTV rules and Comcast sucks.
Comcast is now the "Microsoft Outlook" of the cable industry. If it's all that's available in your region (company), then it's sad for you, but if you have a choice, the wise person dumps Comcast (Outlook).
As much bashing as TechTV has received here, and I agree that some of their programming, like robot wars, was lame, it still was IMO, the best network of its kind. If Comcast takes it over, it will go downhill fast.
One thing I really respected was their desire to not edit out their own computer problems. Someone would call in with a Windows question, and their computer would crash on-air -- and they felt it important to let others see that they too, had problems with blue screens of death and things not working properly. You can bet that Paul Allen's crew will edit out these segments so that everyone who watches will see a flawless computer presentation and therefore think the problems they're having are their fault, and not the result of crappy software.
The TechTV crew are very honest folks that don't bow to the current corporate flavor. I saw them test three brands of wireless push-to-talk devices and they had no reservations about saying which ones sucked and which ones worked. That's refreshing. I guess now we'll see a big string of washed up celebrities going on the show to hawk their latest flop, peppered with more over-hyped software and hardward so that it will be a Tech-ized version of Entertainment Tonite. Oh well. Buh bye TechTV.
went to Slate.com after signing up for a passport, and clicked the "Sign In" button. Now, I had never visited Slate, nor did they have any data on me prior to this. When I clicked "Sign In", that was it.
For this exact reason, it's probably a real bad idea. Who wants every web site you have to register for to have detailed personal information? Some sites may need to know this data, but most do not. And who regulates what is done with the information once collected? Microsoft? eTrust? Give me a break!
IMO, the likelihood of using the Internet to find substantive connections is now analagous to the chances you have of becoming good friends with someone who dials a wrong number to your telephone.
Yea, it still happens all the time, but there's a completely different dynamic to cyberspace now. Many years ago, I got a book deal off the newsgroups, found investors for a venture (who funded a startup to the tune of 6 figures without even meeting in person or talking on the phone), dated a bunch of women and more.
Nowadays, the online scene is a lot different. There are still pockets of people and meet-ups happening with networking going on, but the dynamics are not the same.
For example, an online game such as Everquest, which is a social vehicle, now seems to be mostly filled with people who use the game as an escape from reality and have no desire to communicate or get to know others outside of the game. Nobody reveals as much of themselves any more, and those that do are likely to be more on the unstable side. Cyberspace is viewed more as a medium to be vent, pretend to be someone you're not, or a distraction, rather than a catalyst for networking.
I remember the good ol' days when you could enter a chat room and actually CHAT. Now these places are arenas where people engage in contests to see who has the most meaningless one-liner.
pl-sql is a classic example of a chaotic development environment. It works well, but you're at the mercy of Oracle and other corporations who change the nature of the development environment regularly and obsolete your knowledge base. With Java, you get stuck in the middle of a war betwewen Sun and Microsoft and have to preoccupy a significant percentage of your time towards sorting out incompatibilities which have nothing to do with you main objective.
That's just my opinion though. I remember when I developed a large scale application using pl-sql, I spent as much time understanding the idosynchracies of the development environment as I did the actual application coding.
Slashdot Mirror
You're implying that there's some other kind of journalist?
Call me idealistic, but I distinguish between a writer with an opinion, and one with an agenda.
But world leaders, journalists, and political scientists who tout the Internet as a powerful force for political change are just as wrong as the dot-com enthusiasts who not so long ago believed the Web would completely transform business.
This is a classic example of a writer who had an agenda first, and then sought to write a story to back it up. The whole article is bogus.
The Internet HAS completely transformed business. It has become a major source of a variety of political discussion and activism. Anyone who has been paying attention can see that.
The mainstream political/business publications are resistant to anything which upsets the existing delicate balance, so they often hold new technology (i.e. things they don't understand, or can't control, or can't profit from based on the way they've been leveraging their power and control) to ridiculous, unrealistic standards.
So if we put Internet kiosks in a communist country and the regime doesn't topple in six months, that's a failure of the Internet? Get real!
I know this is nothing new, but am I the only one who doesn't see this new mingling of promotion and editorial which seems to now be totally dominant? An entity "proclaims" something IS the way it IS. Never mind coming up with a realistic explanation. Most people have such short attention spans they don't check the facts or read between the lines.
It's apparently mostly the shitty tipping
The last time I was in Vegas I walked into a Burger King and there was a TIP JAR AT THE REGISTER! That to me, epitomizes Vegas. What am I tipping the guy behind the register in a Burger King for? Giving me correct change?
My favorite completely ridiculous advertising claim these days is Pentax' claim as the Official Digital Camera of the Internet.
These companies have gone completely nuts.
When I used to go to Comdex in Vegas every year, I had a bunch of local friends who used to really despise this convention, the largest ever in Vegas, because apparently the "tech people" didn't gamble. Why? Because they were smart and they knew the odds.
Gambling is basically a tax on poor, dumb people that benefits rich entities. It promotes a something-for-nothing, perverse work ethic.
Now you might say, what about all these dot-com millionaires that are now showing up on the World Poker tour? They're not playing against the house; they're playing against the other players - there's definitely more skill and talent there than pulling the arm of a slot machine.
Personally, I don't really care one way or another. Gambling is just another diversion. I would prefer it not in my community, nor online, but if people want to blow their money, it's their choice. I do worry sometimes about the bad message this says to society that they can "strike it rich" without really having to work hard.
Fair enough. But if there's karma in the world, you'll be much more inconvenienced when EV1 starts screwing over their customers as their business tanks.
All in all, looks like a win-win. Covered from the law suits and now looking like he agrees with the anti-SCO crowd.
Ironically, it's only a win-win situation if he thinks that most of this community are idiots that don't see the big picture.
Someone coming out and admitting he made a mistake, but at the time was trying to do the best for his company deserves respect. We need more people like that in the industry!
I know a guy in Nigeria that would really like to conduct business with you. Drop me your e-mail so I can forward his offer to you. He seems really down to earth and sincere as well. Your type of guy.
Robert thought that he could explain that to the anti-SCO folks, but apparently those people didn't want to listen to him.
Nobody's not listening to him. We hear him loud and clear. All 1000 watts of spineless waffling.
This reminds me of Kevin Mitnik's comments on what happened when he first entered prison. Someone took some of his stuff, and it was a big, burley guy, but he knew he had to fight him. He got his ass kicked but he knew if he let the bully take his stuff, he'd be marked as a "bitch" and forever persecuted. EV1 is da'bitch now.
Can we take advantage of this issue to get some of EV1's competition to come forward and state they will give EV1's customers a better deal and help migrate them over? Along with a pledge they won't pander to SCO's obnoxious extortion?
I use EV1 Hosting. When I read the original announcement, I was disappointed, but I didn't switch. I'm too busy to mess with something that works.
Aye. Principals and integrity are way overrated these days, especially when enforcing them might slightly inconvenience you.
I anxiously look forward to purchasing EV1's servers on eBay very soon, at which point I'll replace the os with FreeBSD.
EV1, be sure to get yourself a very large cemetary plot so there's ample room for the open source community to dance on your grave.
If the mafia shows up in your town and everyone else refuses to pay for their "protection", and one business does, they are your enemy. Hindsight doesn't mean anything in this case. EV1 screwed up and choose the wrong side. Anybody who cares about open source needs to make an example of them for their bad judgement and not do any business with EV1. It's a necessity in order to clearly delineate what we feel is right and wrong. Cowards who give aid to the IP Nazis are no better than the IP Nazis themselves.
We cannot condone their actions, no matter how much their people grovel and admit their mistakes. You can bet if the community didn't boycott them, they wouldn't even be waffling like this. Serves 'em right. EV1 is history. Maybe the next provider will think twice about turning their back on the community that helped make them.
"New hammer promises to change the way homes are built"
It's all about the software. The box is irrelevent. Not that people would know this nowadays because software seems to have taken a back seat to hardware development, but there may come a time where a title will be so innovative that whatever platform it's on will be THE platform. Until then, the whole industry is in a big circle-jerk feeding the populace more hardware with little or no real improvement.
Thats quite true, and I agree with you on most of the aspects, but it WILL force the other companies to get their acts together or end up outof business.
I don't think that Google has exactly been sitting on its laurels. They've continued to innovate. Not all companies that have market share (in a competitive market) aren't aggressively trying to innovate. eBay is another example.
However, this approach has never been Microsoft's business model. Microsoft puts other companies out of business and has a tendency of stifling innovation. A good example is in the anti-virus business. All the software companies out there are more-or-less spending their energy trying to figure out how to make their user's dependent upon them in fear that MS will bundle antivirus software in their next major OS release and put them out of business.
MS doesn't "enter" a market. It hijacks it. Nobody's motivated to compete with a company who doesn't do so on a level playing field.
Since when has Microsoft EVER fostered ANY innovation?
Their idea of entering the search engine business will not involve innovation. It will involve them exploiting their monopoly browser market share to force users to patronize their proprietary search engine.
I only came up with this idea a year ago, and have been aggressively promoting it on slashdot, but a new TLD would be useless. No self-respecting mail system can afford to shut out all other domains in such a trusted system. The whitelist system needs to be applied to the Internet proper, with SMTP licensing. Now if spamhaus wants to limit just SMTP relays for .mail, that follows my plan, but ALL users should subsidize the effort and not just the domain holders... that's not fair as it would really be the general populace that would benefit from a whitelisted SMTP network.
A better movie would be a feature length spoof of the LDS church - Southpark's "All About Morons" was one of their most hilarious episodes.
TechTV has long-term deals with DirecTV
Reason #4,582 why DirecTV rules and Comcast sucks.
Comcast is now the "Microsoft Outlook" of the cable industry. If it's all that's available in your region (company), then it's sad for you, but if you have a choice, the wise person dumps Comcast (Outlook).
As much bashing as TechTV has received here, and I agree that some of their programming, like robot wars, was lame, it still was IMO, the best network of its kind. If Comcast takes it over, it will go downhill fast.
One thing I really respected was their desire to not edit out their own computer problems. Someone would call in with a Windows question, and their computer would crash on-air -- and they felt it important to let others see that they too, had problems with blue screens of death and things not working properly. You can bet that Paul Allen's crew will edit out these segments so that everyone who watches will see a flawless computer presentation and therefore think the problems they're having are their fault, and not the result of crappy software.
The TechTV crew are very honest folks that don't bow to the current corporate flavor. I saw them test three brands of wireless push-to-talk devices and they had no reservations about saying which ones sucked and which ones worked. That's refreshing. I guess now we'll see a big string of washed up celebrities going on the show to hawk their latest flop, peppered with more over-hyped software and hardward so that it will be a Tech-ized version of Entertainment Tonite. Oh well. Buh bye TechTV.
went to Slate.com after signing up for a passport, and clicked the "Sign In" button. Now, I had never visited Slate, nor did they have any data on me prior to this. When I clicked "Sign In", that was it.
For this exact reason, it's probably a real bad idea. Who wants every web site you have to register for to have detailed personal information? Some sites may need to know this data, but most do not. And who regulates what is done with the information once collected? Microsoft? eTrust? Give me a break!
Who needs a back door when Microsoft is guarding your front door?
How can you tell the difference these days?
This article is about 7 years too late.
IMO, the likelihood of using the Internet to find substantive connections is now analagous to the chances you have of becoming good friends with someone who dials a wrong number to your telephone.
Yea, it still happens all the time, but there's a completely different dynamic to cyberspace now. Many years ago, I got a book deal off the newsgroups, found investors for a venture (who funded a startup to the tune of 6 figures without even meeting in person or talking on the phone), dated a bunch of women and more.
Nowadays, the online scene is a lot different. There are still pockets of people and meet-ups happening with networking going on, but the dynamics are not the same.
For example, an online game such as Everquest, which is a social vehicle, now seems to be mostly filled with people who use the game as an escape from reality and have no desire to communicate or get to know others outside of the game. Nobody reveals as much of themselves any more, and those that do are likely to be more on the unstable side. Cyberspace is viewed more as a medium to be vent, pretend to be someone you're not, or a distraction, rather than a catalyst for networking.
I remember the good ol' days when you could enter a chat room and actually CHAT. Now these places are arenas where people engage in contests to see who has the most meaningless one-liner.
pl-sql is a classic example of a chaotic development environment. It works well, but you're at the mercy of Oracle and other corporations who change the nature of the development environment regularly and obsolete your knowledge base. With Java, you get stuck in the middle of a war betwewen Sun and Microsoft and have to preoccupy a significant percentage of your time towards sorting out incompatibilities which have nothing to do with you main objective.
That's just my opinion though. I remember when I developed a large scale application using pl-sql, I spent as much time understanding the idosynchracies of the development environment as I did the actual application coding.