My systems programming professor told us about the time he had to demo a buggy program. He added an interrupt handler which caught SEGV signals and printed "NFS server not responding".
A real company would have been issuing press releases left, right, and centre suggesting that current valuations were unwarranted.
Or, as some of the smarter companies did, use
their paper value to buy up companies with
tangible assets (using shares, *not* cash like
stupider companies did), so they ended up with
some solid value after the crash. In other words,
exploit the situation with an eye on the long term.
The guy is waving his hands when he talks about "basic economic laws". He wants to have somebody he can shout at when his packets don't get through, i.e. a hierarchical distribution model. He sees the Internet as a product, completely managed by a single entity.
The Internet obeys (descriptive) economic laws far better than what guys like this are talking about - it's an open market place, anybody can set up shop, and succeed or fail on the merits of their offering.
The dot-bomb bust isn't due to the made-by-hippies nature of the Net, nor it's unsuitability to commerce, in spite of what Nolle and many posters here seem to think. It's due to basic economic principles of supply and demand - there has been a massive supply of services offered on the Internet, priced far below cost by suppliers chasing the finite demand.
The failure of businesses spending more than they earn is hardly an anomoly of a hippy-built Internet. It's a pretty basic economic law.
Constructing a controlled Internet where the supply side of the market is tightly restricted to a handful of the largest companies would of course be more sustainable.
But personally, I think the best way to approach the Internet as a business-person is to realize that the benefit of the Net as a medium for commerce (in addition to its many non-commercial applications) is saving costs.
The main mistake made by the dot.bombs was the belief that taking a low margin business model onto the Net was going to magically generate massive piles of cash. The most fundamental example is publishing - how many web sites were set up with what is comparable to a single print magazine title, funded to the tune of millions of dollars, hiring a staff of at least 100 people, etc? A typical print magazine runs with a very small staff and tight budgets. What ever made people think that the Net, which lowers barriers to entry into the basement and doesn't have an established, stable advertising market, would make publishing into a surefire money machine?
Ah yes, and we can finally have a political system free of the friction of individual voters. Let's look forward to the day when everyone is coerced into signing over their voting rights in exchange for a job, debt relief, an education, or a year's supply of big macs.
The Libertarians would say any contract between willing parties in a free market is fair, but in the US the market isn't all that free - banks, insurance companies, etc. all hold far more cards than you and I do, and they all dictate pretty much the same terms. And we all have to swallow their terms or else go live in a shack in the woods and type a manifesto.
So I don't have much hope that a country where our votes are for sale will preserve the few shreds of democracy it has left.
The depression, and FDR's presidency, replaced the near-holy status of lasseiz-faire capitalism with a realization that certain types of businesses need to have oversight by law enforcement and by the public to ensure that they act in a responsible manner consistent with the safety of the public
...
If you want a model for effecting change, you'd be better off looking to Martin Luther King Jr. (or Malcom X...) than FDR..
How about George W? He's working hard to roll
things back to the pre-depression era - the
interests of big biz are more important than
those of consumers, workers, our children,
etc. - tax cuts which fuck us 11 years down the
road, regulatory agencies which have decided
they shouldn't be too mean to those poor companies
(what if the Justice Department took the same
philosophies), etc.
My poing being, eventually things will get bad
enought that voters (remember us?) will get pissed
off and some serious changes will come about again.
Oh yeah, IP piracy only happens in countries which
label themselves Communist. If they re-labelled themselves as a free market capitalist democracy, it would go away, just like in Russia.
Complete opposite for me. But then, I'm a history & current events buff, I love messing around with different variations of the earth maps. Alpha Centauri was
boring to me because it didn't have that same connection to the real world.
If their booth bunnies were poor quality, it
improves my hopes for the game. Companies which
spend lots of effort on flashy marketing typically do so because they don't believe in their products. I'd rather they spend their
budget on coding and testing.
The idea that controlling a single square of the board makes it impossible for anyone else in the world to, say, mine iron, is frankly silly. Maybe I just misunderstod the review.
I think/hope you misunderstood - I assume there
are multiple squares for each type of resource,
just as in the real world. Some regions have
oil, some don't.
Look Ma, no hands! It is not a "remote" spy plane, it flies itself. That is what makes this unique. Anyone can build a remote spy plane by mounting a camera on a plane or something.
Thanks for posting this, there are already several ignorant
"remote controlled spy planes, what a cool idea" posts. RC spy plans are already in use, they're in Kosovo,
Iran is using them on rebels based in Iraq, etc. Old hat. What's cool about this one is that it's robotic, and the long range. What are the advantages of making it robotic? I suppose resistence to jamming, and perhaps it avoids detection by being radio-silent? Other ideas?
I'm kind of hoping that Tomcat dies a fiery death. Maybe then someone will go back and resurrect Jserv.
Actually, JServ is being resurrected (sort of), as Tomcat 4.0.
The Tomcat project hit a serious stumbling block
when Sun contributed the code for Java Web Server, which became Tomcat 3.x. Development
pretty much stopped, waiting for them to turn over the code, which turned out to be of very disappointing quality. Early 3.x releases of Tomcat were very shaky, and has given the
project a bad rep. A lot of work has gone into improving the 3.x line, which is getting pretty
damned solid with recent releases (3.2.x).
The original plans of the JServ team for its
next release, Catalina, have been resurrected and are in beta as Tomcat 4.0.
It's a shame that the earlier releases have given the project a bad rep. It's a useful case study for open source projects, and also a good demonstration that commercial code is not always better than open source code. Since they don't let you see what goes on inside the kitchen, you assume it's a professionally run operation with great sanitation and QA, but...
So because some liberal intellectuals don't appreciate the contents of the History Channel, TLC, Bravo, or the Discovery channel, they want all of America (including their so beloved poor) to subsidize content for them. How grand! Democracy at work, wow, what will be next?
Yes, you're right. Let's stick with subsidizing
the purchase of weapons from big corporations
to give to third world governments to burn down
villages with. After all, big corporations
need it so much, and there's not enough death
and suffering in the world. And the amount spent
subsidizing content is such a strain on
the budget, that money could be used to paint
an aircraft carrier.
Because then they have to pander to the mass market, like the History Channel - AKA the "war channel". It's nice to have an alternative to McDonalds-style television. But it's hard to pay
for with advertising. A restaraunt with quality food can charge higher prices to patrons, but a TV network can't charge higher ad rates even if
their content is of higher quality. That's the
essential limitation of commercial-driven television. Maybe they could go subscription (ala HBO), but then they wouldn't be Public - poor kids wouldn't get to watch Sesame Street, so would have to grow up on 100% pokeman.
I like Discovery, History, etc, but I think they
suffer from having to make a profit. The Discovery
channel should be subtitled "The Disaster Channel",
because most of its content is visually exciting,
explosions, volcanoes, lions killing gazelles, etc. In other words, lowest common denominator.
Higher brow stuff, more intellectually oriented stuff tends to attract a smaller
audience, and so has a more difficult time making a profit. I'm a capitalist, I don't think crappy cable channels should be banned, but I also think there's more to life and society than that which turns a profit.
What do you think they will do? Get rich or end up in the land of FuckedCompany?
Seems like they could actually be making enough
money for 2 guys, if they're keeping costs low:
haven't hired anybody, getting hosting for free
(they have a banner for rackspace, and this article is great PR), etc. Their overheads should be very low. They are probably using this site
as creds for getting other work.
Now, if they want to Fuck themselves, they need
to adopt the following business plan:
Get a few million in VC funding. This ensures they will have the advice and support of a bunch of greedy ignorami.
Bulk up their staffing, targeting a size of at least 150 employees in 6 months. This allows them to splash out on office space, equipment, etc. (not to mention the salaries), so the VC cash can be quickly spent. They will never get into FuckedCompany if they don't have staff to submit them.
One word: Wireless!
Of course, they need a B2B model. As anybody who
owns a tie knows, if you have an operational website, you have a software product ready to be marketed to Fortune 500 companies for $100,000 a pop (not to mention the consulting services). Obviously the big brand companies will want to have AmI<insertMarketingCampaign>OrNot sites.
"AmIPepsiGenerationOrNot", for example.
ASP! Fortune500 companies buying into the B2B
offering described above will of course love to
have this as an ASP service, since they would
rather pay a high monthly hosting management fee in addition to the software licensing and consulting fees.
This is just a rough sketch, of course, but it is easy to see that these guys will be ready for an IPO within 12 months, and will be FuckedCompany.com stars. I will of course expect a commission for the use of this proprietary, patented business plan. I accept cash only, no shares/options please.
I know this was a troll (a brilliant one too, every sentence is pure genius), but I have to chime in:
Corporations... are owned by the people. The government... is not. That is all we need to know.
Corporations are owned by people, but they are
not owned by the people. The number of
American voters (if we limit the discussion to the US) is larger than the number of corporate stockholders. Much larger.
Our government sucks, primarily because the influence of money is far greater on the laws it passes and enforces than the influence of the voters. But it at least offers the theory, if not the practice, that each person's influence on the course of government can be roughly equal. Corporations by no means offer this, in theory or practice: influence is strictly limited to money. Those with the biggest block of shares win.
You're confusing the industry with the workers.
It's cheaper for American companies to have their
products manufactured in China, Hong Kong, etc.
than in Lowell, MA. If the owners of big clothing
companies don't give a fuck about the people in Lowell, does that mean they aren't powerful?
Bush and his pals really emphasize this point. In the US we have so many resources, and such powerful and influential groups which profit from their sale, that the idea of conservation as an approach to handling an energy shortage is apparently unthinkable. In places like Japan and Europe, where space and resources are much more scarce, making more efficient use of resources is a necessity. Maybe 100 years from now the US will be forced to face this reality, and by then the global situation will be so dire that the societal changes we'll go through will be very severe. 1000 years from now this will probably be cited by historians as a major cause in the decline and fall of the American Empire.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it`ll tell us ...
... the truth is hidden behind a hyperlink.
Alas, we'll never know, will we
*sigh*
My systems programming professor told us about the time he had to demo a buggy program. He added an interrupt handler which caught SEGV signals and printed "NFS server not responding".
A sysadmin who never crashes anything is worthless.
A real company would have been issuing press releases left, right, and centre suggesting that current valuations were unwarranted.
Or, as some of the smarter companies did, use their paper value to buy up companies with tangible assets (using shares, *not* cash like stupider companies did), so they ended up with some solid value after the crash. In other words, exploit the situation with an eye on the long term.
I hope Mandrake's share price doesn't end up crashing into Mars' North Pole ...
The guy is waving his hands when he talks about "basic economic laws". He wants to have somebody he can shout at when his packets don't get through, i.e. a hierarchical distribution model. He sees the Internet as a product, completely managed by a single entity.
The Internet obeys (descriptive) economic laws far better than what guys like this are talking about - it's an open market place, anybody can set up shop, and succeed or fail on the merits of their offering.
The dot-bomb bust isn't due to the made-by-hippies nature of the Net, nor it's unsuitability to commerce, in spite of what Nolle and many posters here seem to think. It's due to basic economic principles of supply and demand - there has been a massive supply of services offered on the Internet, priced far below cost by suppliers chasing the finite demand.
The failure of businesses spending more than they earn is hardly an anomoly of a hippy-built Internet. It's a pretty basic economic law.
Constructing a controlled Internet where the supply side of the market is tightly restricted to a handful of the largest companies would of course be more sustainable.
But personally, I think the best way to approach the Internet as a business-person is to realize that the benefit of the Net as a medium for commerce (in addition to its many non-commercial applications) is saving costs.
The main mistake made by the dot.bombs was the belief that taking a low margin business model onto the Net was going to magically generate massive piles of cash. The most fundamental example is publishing - how many web sites were set up with what is comparable to a single print magazine title, funded to the tune of millions of dollars, hiring a staff of at least 100 people, etc? A typical print magazine runs with a very small staff and tight budgets. What ever made people think that the Net, which lowers barriers to entry into the basement and doesn't have an established, stable advertising market, would make publishing into a surefire money machine?
Answer: piles and piles of coke.
Yeah, let's burn all the books to keep people from becoming stupid!
Ah yes, and we can finally have a political system free of the friction of individual voters. Let's look forward to the day when everyone is coerced into signing over their voting rights in exchange for a job, debt relief, an education, or a year's supply of big macs.
The Libertarians would say any contract between willing parties in a free market is fair, but in the US the market isn't all that free - banks, insurance companies, etc. all hold far more cards than you and I do, and they all dictate pretty much the same terms. And we all have to swallow their terms or else go live in a shack in the woods and type a manifesto.
So I don't have much hope that a country where our votes are for sale will preserve the few shreds of democracy it has left.
The depression, and FDR's presidency, replaced the near-holy status of lasseiz-faire capitalism with a realization that certain types of businesses need to have oversight by law enforcement and by the public to ensure that they act in a responsible manner consistent with the safety of the public
...
If you want a model for effecting change, you'd be better off looking to Martin Luther King Jr. (or Malcom X...) than FDR..
How about George W? He's working hard to roll things back to the pre-depression era - the interests of big biz are more important than those of consumers, workers, our children, etc. - tax cuts which fuck us 11 years down the road, regulatory agencies which have decided they shouldn't be too mean to those poor companies (what if the Justice Department took the same philosophies), etc.
My poing being, eventually things will get bad enought that voters (remember us?) will get pissed off and some serious changes will come about again.
I mean, are there any disadvantages to chosing PostgreSql over MySQL?
If you're doing development on Windows, Postgres is ~1000 times harder to install than MySQL.
oh please, it's the same in Russia as it is in China
russia....democracy......hahaha.....you're funny, you know that?
No I didn't. Somebody once told me I was ironic, but I didn't know what it meant.
Oh yeah, IP piracy only happens in countries which label themselves Communist. If they re-labelled themselves as a free market capitalist democracy, it would go away, just like in Russia.
Complete opposite for me. But then, I'm a history & current events buff, I love messing around with different variations of the earth maps. Alpha Centauri was boring to me because it didn't have that same connection to the real world.
If their booth bunnies were poor quality, it improves my hopes for the game. Companies which spend lots of effort on flashy marketing typically do so because they don't believe in their products. I'd rather they spend their budget on coding and testing.
The idea that controlling a single square of the board makes it impossible for anyone else in the world to, say, mine iron, is frankly silly. Maybe I just misunderstod the review.
I think/hope you misunderstood - I assume there are multiple squares for each type of resource, just as in the real world. Some regions have oil, some don't.
"We'd a crummy little dot-bomb. "
All of the dot-bombs I know use(d) Oracle, because it's got the best "brand". And because they've got the slickest sales critters.
Look Ma, no hands! It is not a "remote" spy plane, it flies itself. That is what makes this unique. Anyone can build a remote spy plane by mounting a camera on a plane or something.
Thanks for posting this, there are already several ignorant "remote controlled spy planes, what a cool idea" posts. RC spy plans are already in use, they're in Kosovo, Iran is using them on rebels based in Iraq, etc. Old hat. What's cool about this one is that it's robotic, and the long range. What are the advantages of making it robotic? I suppose resistence to jamming, and perhaps it avoids detection by being radio-silent? Other ideas?
I'm kind of hoping that Tomcat dies a fiery death. Maybe then someone will go back and resurrect Jserv.
...
Actually, JServ is being resurrected (sort of), as Tomcat 4.0.
The Tomcat project hit a serious stumbling block when Sun contributed the code for Java Web Server, which became Tomcat 3.x. Development pretty much stopped, waiting for them to turn over the code, which turned out to be of very disappointing quality. Early 3.x releases of Tomcat were very shaky, and has given the project a bad rep. A lot of work has gone into improving the 3.x line, which is getting pretty damned solid with recent releases (3.2.x).
The original plans of the JServ team for its next release, Catalina, have been resurrected and are in beta as Tomcat 4.0.
It's a shame that the earlier releases have given the project a bad rep. It's a useful case study for open source projects, and also a good demonstration that commercial code is not always better than open source code. Since they don't let you see what goes on inside the kitchen, you assume it's a professionally run operation with great sanitation and QA, but
So because some liberal intellectuals don't appreciate the contents of the History Channel, TLC, Bravo, or the Discovery channel, they want all of America (including their so beloved poor) to subsidize content for them. How grand! Democracy at work, wow, what will be next?
Yes, you're right. Let's stick with subsidizing the purchase of weapons from big corporations to give to third world governments to burn down villages with. After all, big corporations need it so much, and there's not enough death and suffering in the world. And the amount spent subsidizing content is such a strain on the budget, that money could be used to paint an aircraft carrier.
Because then they have to pander to the mass market, like the History Channel - AKA the "war channel". It's nice to have an alternative to McDonalds-style television. But it's hard to pay for with advertising. A restaraunt with quality food can charge higher prices to patrons, but a TV network can't charge higher ad rates even if their content is of higher quality. That's the essential limitation of commercial-driven television. Maybe they could go subscription (ala HBO), but then they wouldn't be Public - poor kids wouldn't get to watch Sesame Street, so would have to grow up on 100% pokeman.
I like Discovery, History, etc, but I think they suffer from having to make a profit. The Discovery channel should be subtitled "The Disaster Channel", because most of its content is visually exciting, explosions, volcanoes, lions killing gazelles, etc. In other words, lowest common denominator. Higher brow stuff, more intellectually oriented stuff tends to attract a smaller audience, and so has a more difficult time making a profit. I'm a capitalist, I don't think crappy cable channels should be banned, but I also think there's more to life and society than that which turns a profit.
Seems like they could actually be making enough money for 2 guys, if they're keeping costs low: haven't hired anybody, getting hosting for free (they have a banner for rackspace, and this article is great PR), etc. Their overheads should be very low. They are probably using this site as creds for getting other work.
Now, if they want to Fuck themselves, they need to adopt the following business plan:
Get a few million in VC funding. This ensures they will have the advice and support of a bunch of greedy ignorami.
Bulk up their staffing, targeting a size of at least 150 employees in 6 months. This allows them to splash out on office space, equipment, etc. (not to mention the salaries), so the VC cash can be quickly spent. They will never get into FuckedCompany if they don't have staff to submit them.
One word: Wireless!
Of course, they need a B2B model. As anybody who owns a tie knows, if you have an operational website, you have a software product ready to be marketed to Fortune 500 companies for $100,000 a pop (not to mention the consulting services). Obviously the big brand companies will want to have AmI<insertMarketingCampaign>OrNot sites. "AmIPepsiGenerationOrNot", for example.
ASP! Fortune500 companies buying into the B2B offering described above will of course love to have this as an ASP service, since they would rather pay a high monthly hosting management fee in addition to the software licensing and consulting fees.
This is just a rough sketch, of course, but it is easy to see that these guys will be ready for an IPO within 12 months, and will be FuckedCompany.com stars. I will of course expect a commission for the use of this proprietary, patented business plan. I accept cash only, no shares/options please.
I know this was a troll (a brilliant one too, every sentence is pure genius), but I have to chime in:
... are owned by the people. The government ... is not. That is all we need to know.
Corporations
Corporations are owned by people, but they are not owned by the people. The number of American voters (if we limit the discussion to the US) is larger than the number of corporate stockholders. Much larger.
Our government sucks, primarily because the influence of money is far greater on the laws it passes and enforces than the influence of the voters. But it at least offers the theory, if not the practice, that each person's influence on the course of government can be roughly equal. Corporations by no means offer this, in theory or practice: influence is strictly limited to money. Those with the biggest block of shares win.
You're confusing the industry with the workers. It's cheaper for American companies to have their products manufactured in China, Hong Kong, etc. than in Lowell, MA. If the owners of big clothing companies don't give a fuck about the people in Lowell, does that mean they aren't powerful?
Bush and his pals really emphasize this point. In the US we have so many resources, and such powerful and influential groups which profit from their sale, that the idea of conservation as an approach to handling an energy shortage is apparently unthinkable. In places like Japan and Europe, where space and resources are much more scarce, making more efficient use of resources is a necessity. Maybe 100 years from now the US will be forced to face this reality, and by then the global situation will be so dire that the societal changes we'll go through will be very severe. 1000 years from now this will probably be cited by historians as a major cause in the decline and fall of the American Empire.