Here in the "old world" it looks sometimes a tad odd when reading Murican websites about a net tax and why it's such big a deal
But I digress of course. The states as such have no concept of value added tax (there's a sales tax, but that's dependent on the state or even on the county, but I might have the details screwed),
Within every Europeong country value added tax is enforced on a federal level. The rates might vary (slightly), but it's considered a quite vital part of state income.
Therefore I don't believe that it will be such a big issue, since when you buy a Mercedes (or the services of a psychic for all it matters) there's anyway VAT added to the price. So folks probably won't get all worked up when the same applies on net purchases.
What probably also adds a big deal to the fact that nobody much gives a fuck here is that the tax is included on purchases. Sort of like an airport tax on your flight ticket.
We'd probably take a dim view on (ah! hell for the sake of the example) the pricing structure of a virtual restaurant meal. Let's see:
The net-special (foie gras, then the chateau briand and a desert plus a bottle of '87 Chateau Palmer) goes for 100$. Now, when you get it served herearound it doesn't go for 100$ in the first place, but it's charged at 135$, which includes the tip and vat. Now, what would appear odd to us is seeing the 100$ price tag on the virtual menue, but then get billed the 135$. (Service charge is included in most Europeong countries, but you're welcome to overtip of course).
Another difference is the perception of tax as a conspiracy between the devil, Bill Gates and PacBell which is not necessarily perceived that way by our good citizens. Not that we feel that every tax $ is spent for a worthy cause, but the necessity to provide money for a working infrastructure slides (at least that's my perception) down a European throat easier.
The big challenge will be to find common ground upon implementing it within the EU and associated countries...
This article was a hoot. I can really picture some slick talking marketing guy and his lines of reasoning:
Yeah, there's this independant testing lab, verifying our nano-cool neuronal rocket science algorithms, working with 99.8% reliability. The name ? No, that's really secret that the Rush Limbaugh institute for creative certification is the independent lab...
Nah, I've used it myself 30 or 60 days ago. I could only get to the dirty pickies at the XXXsmutshop after disabling our super software...
Wot ? An old version ? Hey we're into rocket science advancing our secret algorithm on a daily basis. Since it's so advanced we don't need version control, therefor we don't have a version that actually worked anymore. But trust me, I'm in the DOTCOM business...
Shheeeesh, that guy must have been straight out from twisted tongue marketing academy...
Should they be able to tell you what you can do with your knowledge? The US economy is 1000 times more robust than European economies because we allow people with ideas to exploit them.
Sheeesh ! That's about the most dumb-assed comment I ever read on a fairly intelligent forum.
I won't even ask you to back that up with figures. But I do ask you from which Europe you're talking ?
Portugal, which is pretty rural and has economic structures like 50 years before ?
France, which still believes in the concept of La Grande Nation, blows nuclear bombs in the South Pacific if unemployment runs high and has a pretty bad misconception about personal freedom if it interfers with national prestige ?
Italy maybe, which has a higher priority to eat the best food in the world then just making the almighty buck. What's wrong with that concept ?
Do you mean Finland. The most networked nation in the world. Is Nokia (who kicked but big time with, e.g. Motorolla because European companies understand the concept of diversity better) a European or a specifically Finnish company ?
Holland maybe, with one of the most stable economies in the world despite the fact that they don't reposess your house and your car and they don't throw you into jail just because you smoke a joint ?
I also like the term exploit. Like exploiting communal values for the almighty $. Like killing off a public transport system because an automotive -, an oil - and a tire company are allowed to conspire to kill the system off that benefits all of us, because they can buy it out. Like the Brits that allow the railways to exploit their travellers thrue the worst train system in Europe with the highest prices and the biggest delays after going private. Or the water supply companies that lose 30% of the water through a rotting pipe system, which they have no interest in maintaining the infrastructure in while jacking up the prices fourfold.
Thank you very much, but the European concept of privacy is not necessarily a huge govenment agency with the charm of an IRS and the right to seize my computer because I have my girlfriends address stored without her signing official waver 4711. It's about giving the individual a leverage to go after swines that violate an individual. It's about valuing individual freedom higher then the right of a company to make money on the expense of society and it's about common sense...
You're probably quite right from a (ok, I kick that term in losely) purists point of view.
Where I came from was the newbie assuming that he/she has not too much U*X background.
What actually stunned me after installing the SuSE distro (which indeed is good overall) is the standard kernel that they provide you with.
That thing is so bloated like Word 2317 with the Kisuaheli spell checker enabled. Can you spell BLOATWARE
That said, I can see where they are coming from. Installation is neat however, and due to the massive kernel probably everything and then some is supported.
I agree that python (or perl or whatever) scripts should not be your system administrator, but again, that's in an ideal world and you can't convert Windoze victims to a real operating system if the crotches are not supplied to make it simple.
Since I'm rather happy with my current installation (2.2.16 self-compiled, very modular so to speak) and don't see a reason to tinker with other distros. But yast is as good as yanked. Neverless it provides for a (more or less) hassle free start...
Alright, here's my two francs worth: What means better ? Frankly, I never worked with Slackware but from what I get it's pretty much do it yourself, which might be a tad tricky for a newbie.
Get one of the semi-commercial packages. They have pretty nifty setup tools which will make life much easier. SuSE is the best distro of course, don't listen to what other people say (ho!ho!, incoming...)
Seriously, it doesn't really matter and everybody has his preferences.
KDE is not a distro, but one of the two desktop architectures (GNOME being the other). As with distributions there's a wholy war going on between people involved into a nasty urinating competition. Again, it doesn't really matter. Both have their pros and cons and it's a matter of taste and what you're used to.
gimp is probably the only thing where everybody agrees. Probably because there's no real alternative...
It's pretty impressive in terms of organizing an (relational) database. Be it in terms of reasonable response time or maintenance.
Just look into the backup aspects, which are certainly not trivial: Let's say you have a fiber channel link to the backup sub system and the database in question is a good backup citizen and handles 80 Gbyte per hour.
Believe me, that's darn good throughput and rarely achieved in the real world. Go calculate.
What shudders me most about the story is the (Err, yessir; you know we had this incredible stoopid.COM biznes model idea, collected data for a few month and - sheesh I tell ya boy - where we stunned that we suddenly sat on 40 terra bytes of data...) approach of database engineering.
I've seen a lot of outrageously dumb approaches in database design and engineering. But those blokes really deserve a top slot in the list.
Sounds as if I oughta purchase it
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Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 2
If Mattel includes this feature in their international versions they are walking on very thin ice. Ohhh! Plus that bad, bad guys would be exporting encryption. Do they have a license? Did they register with the feds? Isn't that a federal crime if they don't?
Domestic laws (Switzerland) make it a federal crime, punishable by lengthy jail time to steal business information and trade secrets (it's considered industrial espionage and the authorities take a dim view on that). I run a business and my computers most definitely contains proprietary and confidential data. Not only from my company, but also from my customers, which include telcos, worldwide operating fright forwarding companies, international organisations with immunity status, etc.
So, let's run that sucker, gather as much evidence as possible and then have a chat with the local DA.
Provided that the DA is interested (0.7 possibility:>) does that mean that Mattels country manager is going to jail ? Most likely not. Does that mean that the local Mattel office (or their distributor) is having a real hard time and a shitload of trouble? Likely. I can possibly prove that they sucked data (unauthorized and without my knowledge) from my companies computer. They must prove that it's no confidential data which should be hard, painful & cost them a lot.
If stuff like this continues I might just be up for it.
Do those bozos actually consider that they might be breaking (criminal) laws in other counries and that the world does not only consist of the US of A?
What a bunch of wanking losers...
Ahh, it's always great catching myself in the act of being guilty of wrong-think. The fuck-shit act never really bothered me, but like so many casual press readers I had the impression of a woman capitalizing on her prominence due to the fact of being the wife of Mr. Cobain.
The first attitude change came when I saw her as an actress, and a damn fine one at that. But a musician ? Serves me right, since I didn't actually bother to LISTEN.
This transcript really got to me. Actually I just faxed it off to one of my best friends in the sincere hope he reads it for his enlightnment (serves him right that he still has one of those ol' thermo roll faxes).
I'd order all three albums at once, but there's the fact that that transcript really triggers a guilt reflex in even thinking of buing a CD, seriously.
Alright, I stop jabbering now and publicly (albeit somewhat anonymously) apologise to her for being a prejudiced idiot...
/al
BTW: As ac pointed out, I'd also have liked to be at the coke concert. Specifically in the VIP lounge with all those corporate dickheads. Drug of choice ? Either the competing product or if that fails LSD oughta be fun...
That's sort of the beauty of the whole thing. The RIAA and their cronies of the motion picture industry are heading towards disaster, while being totally clueless about what's going on.
When Mr. Bronfman insists on the non-anonymous internet I take offense. I say that as a person that never downloaded illegal material from the net and use it since 1992.
Those greed freaks are really willing to sacrifice one of the most important values (not anonimity per se, but the right to be left alone, it's called privacy) to regain their stranglehold on the distribution channels and to keep control over the artists (hint: that's called slavery).
Now for the good news: Napster goes ? Maybe, there are half a dozen companies and grass roots organisations that will replace the service instantly or are suplementing it with a decentralized and not easy killable structure.
The entertainment industry? They lose. They have lost already and they are spending money, resources and energy on a totally lost cause. As soon a viable business model is up the whole distribution channels will change dramatically. Artists will be less and less willing to sell out their soul just for getting published and at the same time they will make more money.
The even better news is that the more the established industries use they're energies towards one (or two or maybe three companies) the more they are doomed to fail, because time is an incredible critical factor.
Read the Salon transcript if you haven't yet. It's very informative.
Bye now, obsolete Dinosaurs, bye RIAA, bye Mr. Bronfman. You may go and bang yer heads now...
All the power to the artists
At first I figured that Ms. Love is serving her self interest which is legitimate of course. Diving deeper into the article however, there's an anger and energy which must be admired. She reveals an artsists perspective (and yes, since seeing The people vs Larry flint I definitely consider her to be an artist and not just a blonde, arse swinging bimbo) about what really stinks in the entrtainment business.
Even if taken with a lot of grains of salt, it's an unbelievable gripping speach she gave and the more I dived into it, the more credibility I gave her.
Gawd, I really would have loved to be there...
Re:Clueless about the concept
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Napster Wars
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· Score: 1
Absolutely. Of course you can't stop it. The let's sue all Britney Spears fans attitude (which by the way is fine with me) is about the same approach as an oistrich, sticking his head into the sand, when somebody is just about to build an eight lane super highway over his feable body. Actually it's worse, because at least the RIAA should have the monetary resources to hire some brain power. Ah never mind...
It's the same stupid idiocy as the one from the American gubinmint in their sorry attempt to ban encryption when the PGP genie was out of the bottle.
The solution ? Easy: Provide VALUE to the customer regardless of the distribution channel and leave the how can we extort them best attitude away. I'm willing to bet that the contentcompany grasping this concept will get rich and then some (plus get a free vacation to Hawaii kicked in)...
Clueless about the concept
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Napster Wars
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· Score: 2
No, piracy is not OK in my book and I can see why artists are very concerned about the possibilities of ripping them off big time due to digital distibution.
That said, yes: I do believe that the major labels and their representing bodies are big time shmucks, completely unclear about the concept.
Neverless, it's not about loss of $ and they couldn't care less about the artists they pretend to represent. It's about loss of their stranglehold of the distribution channels and more then anything else its about loss of POWER .
The main difference is not the amount of boxes where the OS is running, but the fact that customers running VMS partially had a need to know what was going on in the internals of their (mission critical) systems.
For a financially potent company it wouldn't have been any problem at all to acquire the VMS source code and use it to their advantage.
You are correct, of course, that at that time software was an add on to the rather expensive hardware and that paradigm changed dramatically.
Still, I wouldn't want to run a nuclear power plant or a space shuttle without the ability of experts looking into the inyards driving such a system.
As a previous poster pointed out, an API is certainly not the source code. However, this doesn't answer the question if Open Source software should be free. (You certainly shouldn't be charged an arm and a leg just to use the interfaces of a software product).
Certainly there's no necessity that software must be given away, just because the source code is provided. There are huge efforts behind software design, coding, production, packaging, marketing and distribution. Giving the source code to the end customer might be an additional sales point if it benefits the customer.
A noteable example was one of the most proprietary and (IMO) best operating systems ever: VMS. For an (significant) additional charge customers where able to purchase the source code ( afiew exceptions, like LAT applied). Did this hurt VMS ? I believe actually the opposite. Nobody went along and just copied the operating system. Certainly concepts where copied, but to do that the source code is anyway not required.
Finding an analogy in my line of work (consulting in complex, huge and often distributed data management environments) I can't see any significant advantage of keeping customers, who pay a significant hourly rate, in the dark. Quite the opposite: Letting them in on my knowledge (or most of it anyway) is almost a guarantee for repeat business...
That's in my opinion of course, but I believe it was in the early eighties when the first machines with a digital display hit the market. Evil Knievel comes to mind. That's not to say that there weren't charming and exciting machines with a digital display, even during the nineties.
However, the moment the clink-a-clonk digits counters where pulled off the market (and it was a darn rapid process too) was the moment where pinball went downhill...
I can see your aggrevation. However, the evil empire is not allone on this. Every major database vendor charges a (sometimes considerable, depending on the application) license fee. Frankly, having worked for a database vendor I have mixed feelings on the issue. Actually it's probably fairer towards the end user to pay a one time Internet connectivity "fine" then being licensed on a per connection base (would hurt Amazons or Yahoo's business model pretty much). This is of course in the context of a licensing model per client seat. The other side of course, is that vendors exploit the fact that end users (or licensees) don't have a choice.
Knowing (some of the) software business from the inside I truely believe that it's one of the most corrupt and rotten industries in existence. That's only slightly behind arms dealers, credit card companies and time share salesmen.
Re:Ask not... AS/400 helped kill off DEC too
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Copyrant
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· Score: 1
Nope. DEC had quite an edge in the financial sector. Especially trading platforms. Major stock exchanges where built around VMS (or VMS/AXP) (Australian Stock Exchange, Swiss Stock Exchange and probably others). Even middle of the nineties The Swiss Postbank built their new system around Alphas under VMS/AXP. It's a monster handling 3 million transactions (8 TPC/C trx each) on an average day, shuffling approx. 10'000'000'000 $ around (avg. per day) and was benchmarked at 9'000'000 such trx per 24 hours. The system maintains over 2'000'000 accounts and never had a serious glitch.
Where DEC fucked up big time was the arrogance to rely on their proprietary systems. They laughed away the PC as an engineering desaster, which was factually true, but the market didn't care. Then there was the major U*X fiasko. DEC had a U*X derivate called Ultrix which was a bad joke and virtually abandoned from one day to another. This didn't make customers happy.
Ken Olssen himself labeled U*X as "Snake Oil". He might have been even right that VMS was the conceptually far better OS at that time, but the market - once again - didn't care.
DEC made the major mistake to hang on to the mantra of engineering purism. They might have been right factually, but when banks can set up entire trading floors with SUNs for 1/3 of the price and the advantage that U*X workstations boot significantly faster then VMS machines (traders are not the most patient lot) they go away.
The Alpha processor was another story. Essentially I do believe that this engineering masterpiece could have saved the company, if it wouldn't have been to little to late and better marketed. They had a 24 month headstart towards the competition and that's eons in microprocessor design
Alpha really illustrates DECs trouble. Technically way ahead, but the most rotten marketing team I've ever seen (Sybase comes close). Besides Alpha here are a few examples:
Networking: DECnet was way ahead. That was developed and extended way before companies like Novell even existed and made networks popular. They lost out to tcp/ip due to (once again) stuberness. Neverless DECnet was early and superb.
Clustering. From the mid/late 80s you could just stick a few VAXes together via a part that virtually was unbreakable (starcoupler). The magic relied entirely on the software. A cluster was completely transparent to the users. You just connected to the cluster and you where assigned a session on the node with the least load. When I see what HP is doing now with Metroclusters (Year 2000 AD) the comparision comes up between a Nokia 8210 cell phone and a phone system made out of two tin cans and a thread.
There are other examples, but in a nutshell I'd blame the breakdown on:
Almost religious fanatism engineering wise
Not listening to the market
Being true visionaries until middle/end 80s and then getting fat, lazy and arrogant
Missing very vital developments (PC, U*X, Work Stations, tcp/ip, etc..) and then doing to little too late
Re:Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
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Copyrant
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· Score: 1
VAXman, Hallelujah, brother. I don't necessarily agree with Compaq being a good move. But for the rest you're on the dot...
Re:Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
Oh, add Digital Equipment Corporation (RIP) to that list.
They had the entire market cornered regarding mini computers in the eighties.
They had the probably (and in my opinion of course) most stable and best thought out OS at that time
They had the development framework which (up to today) you can only dream off.
They had the best darn engineering teams in the industry (label me as arrogant, but I'm truely convinced of that).
They had an extremely loyal and devoted customer base.
Lest we forget an incredible pool of tallented and partially brilliant employees.
What happened? Instead of going open (the great late 80s, early 90s buzzword) some shit-for-brain managers (and I don't mean Mr. Olsen) attempted to lock in the customer base, keep the OS as propriatary as possible and charge a shitload of money for each an everything (including software and upgrades for universities).
Well, the company is defunct and not many technically knowledgeable folks really believe that a marketing oriented box assembler is really capable of delivering the required industry grade goods and services to enterprise customers.
Sorry for getting carried away here. But as an ex-Deccie who experienced the probably best company in the world at that time, it hurts up to this day to see the COMPAQ logo on former DECpark due to some idiots that went to business school but have / had NO clue whatsoever.
Having first hand, frustrating experiences with pre-installed, pre configured, "we give you a rescue disk, but no software" and all that crap makes me feel rather strongly on the issue. Setting up my companies blazing 1 computer infrastructure not so long ago I (like millions of others) had a choice between getting the Toshiba box I wanted either with Wank '98 or Wank NT.
Attempting to be a professional enterprise I required NT of course. Obviously nobody else required this inventive, user-friendly and browser integrated OS since the distributor claimed to need a month to ship a pre-configured box.
Solution: Get the Wank 98 box and cough up an additional 200$ for an NT OEM license.
Happy, happy, joy, joy, but not quite: The manufacturer considered my business to be a dump for his ol' NT4 Service Pack 1 software, which of course fails to install on a 13 Gb HD.
After completely wrecking the installation you try to use the "rescue" disk nothing was rescued, actually I got the feeling that more damage was done then anything else.
To make a long story short, I returned the OEM version and laughed the sales guy away when he offered an aditional upgrade.
The good part of the story is that I went to the next bookstore, bought S.u.S.E Linux for a mere 50 or so bucks on six CDs which apparently harmonizes just fine with 13 gig disks.
Granted that even as a (fairly experienced) U*X user there is a learning curve. Granted that there are no such great features like break dancing paperclips, integrated browsers etc..., it was the best business decision ever.
I yet have to install the full (400$) NT license I purchased (bad business decision) 2 weeks later.
As a distributed database geek I have three industry strength databases running, if necessary in parallel and if Sybase releases Replication Server for Linux (which is rumored) I shall be a real happy camper. Especially since I bloody know what's going on on that system .
Conclusion: The monopolists of this world actually push consumers into being Free Software / Open Source (take your pick) users, especially since the various distros get easier and easier to install and maintain for Average Q User and more and more businesses get serverly pissed of by broken promises and strangling license contracts...
Still on GIMP 1.0.4 though, would like to see that updated.
Well, it's still the newest, stable release. I on the other side was mighty pissed about S.u.S.E, deploying the 1.1.17 developer release, which carshed on a lot of occasions.
Ah well, all of us have our preferences...
Re:GSM Dual-Band (Re:Bad Business Model)
on
Iridium Saved?
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· Score: 1
So GSM doesn't cover oceans and such, and Iridium could have made a great market
Sure, but event then the market is limited. On oceans there's the Inmarsat system running successfully for years and years. (Alright, you might not have the equipment on a small sailing vessel).
Then, if you're a business traveller and you really are on the ocean, chances are that you don't want to place or receive phone calls in the first place.
All that said, there is a valid reason for sat phones. But even then, there where viable (albeit even more clunky) phones available to those people that really needed it.
Let me try a ballpark (very ballpark) calculation here:
Dedicated sat network: 6 billion
Maintaining a logistical infrastructure: 0.8 billion
Maintaining a reasonable billing system: 0.8 billion (that's figuring in that 60 - 70% of all costs of a telco are for customer billing).
Sales and marketing: 1.5 billion
Incidentals: 2 billion
Total: 11.1 billion bucks
Now we find cheap financing at 6% which gives annual financing costs of 670'000'000$ without a bloody call made.
It could have worked as a long term investment and with a different business model. But the way those blokes set it up it was doomed.
Of course I'm an outsider, since I don't use Iridium...
Basically both of them, But just clogging the net with a ton of additional bandwith is just plain dumb.
Oh, and the activists where just plain dumb to have all packages originate from the same IP address.
After MP3s, videos, stoopid porn and DoSA clogging the net, please give me back good ol' ascii text...
Yeah, mod it down as redundant if you please, but Iridium was too little, too late and too expensive.
Stand by for my analysis:
When Iridium finally hit the market, enabling the purchase of a clunky handset for $3'500 enabling phone calls for 7 bucks a pop, err! a minute they left out the most important entity: The business traveller.
A lot of business travellers don't reside in the US and Korea. The US still has the problem of an 80% ananlog network, which is notoriously complicated, calls are paid by the receiver (partially) and if you really depend on your phone, Iridium might be an, allas expensive option. Why Korea didn't go for GSM escapes me.
The rest of the business world relies on GSM. Now with GSM I can exit the plane in Paris switch on my phone and place & receive calls for 40 cents a minute after thirty seconds. The same applies for Australian cities, the Indonisian djungle or a Bangkok surburb. Oh, yeah: The sicilian mountain village also provides excellent reception. Oh and all this on my neat new Nokia 8210, curtesy of Swisscom.
Those few polar scientists, astronauts and Y2K business that pay the price just don't build up critical mass.
Ergo an expensive, and outdated businessplan, ignoring not only technical development, but also half of the civilized world and no fashionable handsets.
Iridium was doomed and who cares
Thank you for your attention...
Slashdot Mirror
But I digress of course. The states as such have no concept of value added tax (there's a sales tax, but that's dependent on the state or even on the county, but I might have the details screwed),
Within every Europeong country value added tax is enforced on a federal level. The rates might vary (slightly), but it's considered a quite vital part of state income.
Therefore I don't believe that it will be such a big issue, since when you buy a Mercedes (or the services of a psychic for all it matters) there's anyway VAT added to the price. So folks probably won't get all worked up when the same applies on net purchases.
What probably also adds a big deal to the fact that nobody much gives a fuck here is that the tax is included on purchases. Sort of like an airport tax on your flight ticket.
We'd probably take a dim view on (ah! hell for the sake of the example) the pricing structure of a virtual restaurant meal. Let's see:
The net-special (foie gras, then the chateau briand and a desert plus a bottle of '87 Chateau Palmer) goes for 100$. Now, when you get it served herearound it doesn't go for 100$ in the first place, but it's charged at 135$, which includes the tip and vat. Now, what would appear odd to us is seeing the 100$ price tag on the virtual menue, but then get billed the 135$. (Service charge is included in most Europeong countries, but you're welcome to overtip of course).
Another difference is the perception of tax as a conspiracy between the devil, Bill Gates and PacBell which is not necessarily perceived that way by our good citizens. Not that we feel that every tax $ is spent for a worthy cause, but the necessity to provide money for a working infrastructure slides (at least that's my perception) down a European throat easier.
The big challenge will be to find common ground upon implementing it within the EU and associated countries...
Yeah, there's this independant testing lab, verifying our nano-cool neuronal rocket science algorithms, working with 99.8% reliability. The name ? No, that's really secret that the Rush Limbaugh institute for creative certification is the independent lab...
Nah, I've used it myself 30 or 60 days ago. I could only get to the dirty pickies at the XXXsmutshop after disabling our super software...
Wot ? An old version ? Hey we're into rocket science advancing our secret algorithm on a daily basis. Since it's so advanced we don't need version control, therefor we don't have a version that actually worked anymore. But trust me, I'm in the DOTCOM business...
Shheeeesh, that guy must have been straight out from twisted tongue marketing academy...
Sheeesh ! That's about the most dumb-assed comment I ever read on a fairly intelligent forum.
I won't even ask you to back that up with figures. But I do ask you from which Europe you're talking ?
Portugal, which is pretty rural and has economic structures like 50 years before ?
France, which still believes in the concept of La Grande Nation, blows nuclear bombs in the South Pacific if unemployment runs high and has a pretty bad misconception about personal freedom if it interfers with national prestige ?
Italy maybe, which has a higher priority to eat the best food in the world then just making the almighty buck. What's wrong with that concept ?
Do you mean Finland. The most networked nation in the world. Is Nokia (who kicked but big time with, e.g. Motorolla because European companies understand the concept of diversity better) a European or a specifically Finnish company ?
Holland maybe, with one of the most stable economies in the world despite the fact that they don't reposess your house and your car and they don't throw you into jail just because you smoke a joint ?
I also like the term exploit. Like exploiting communal values for the almighty $. Like killing off a public transport system because an automotive -, an oil - and a tire company are allowed to conspire to kill the system off that benefits all of us, because they can buy it out. Like the Brits that allow the railways to exploit their travellers thrue the worst train system in Europe with the highest prices and the biggest delays after going private. Or the water supply companies that lose 30% of the water through a rotting pipe system, which they have no interest in maintaining the infrastructure in while jacking up the prices fourfold.
Thank you very much, but the European concept of privacy is not necessarily a huge govenment agency with the charm of an IRS and the right to seize my computer because I have my girlfriends address stored without her signing official waver 4711. It's about giving the individual a leverage to go after swines that violate an individual. It's about valuing individual freedom higher then the right of a company to make money on the expense of society and it's about common sense...
Where I came from was the newbie assuming that he/she has not too much U*X background.
What actually stunned me after installing the SuSE distro (which indeed is good overall) is the standard kernel that they provide you with.
That thing is so bloated like Word 2317 with the Kisuaheli spell checker enabled. Can you spell BLOATWARE
That said, I can see where they are coming from. Installation is neat however, and due to the massive kernel probably everything and then some is supported.
I agree that python (or perl or whatever) scripts should not be your system administrator, but again, that's in an ideal world and you can't convert Windoze victims to a real operating system if the crotches are not supplied to make it simple.
Since I'm rather happy with my current installation (2.2.16 self-compiled, very modular so to speak) and don't see a reason to tinker with other distros. But yast is as good as yanked. Neverless it provides for a (more or less) hassle free start...
Alright, here's my two francs worth: What means better ? Frankly, I never worked with Slackware but from what I get it's pretty much do it yourself, which might be a tad tricky for a newbie.
Get one of the semi-commercial packages. They have pretty nifty setup tools which will make life much easier. SuSE is the best distro of course, don't listen to what other people say (ho!ho!, incoming...)
Seriously, it doesn't really matter and everybody has his preferences.
KDE is not a distro, but one of the two desktop architectures (GNOME being the other). As with distributions there's a wholy war going on between people involved into a nasty urinating competition. Again, it doesn't really matter. Both have their pros and cons and it's a matter of taste and what you're used to.
gimp is probably the only thing where everybody agrees. Probably because there's no real alternative...
Just look into the backup aspects, which are certainly not trivial: Let's say you have a fiber channel link to the backup sub system and the database in question is a good backup citizen and handles 80 Gbyte per hour.
Believe me, that's darn good throughput and rarely achieved in the real world. Go calculate.
What shudders me most about the story is the (Err, yessir; you know we had this incredible stoopid .COM biznes model idea, collected data for a few month and - sheesh I tell ya boy - where we stunned that we suddenly sat on 40 terra bytes of data...) approach of database engineering.
I've seen a lot of outrageously dumb approaches in database design and engineering. But those blokes really deserve a top slot in the list.
If Mattel includes this feature in their international versions they are walking on very thin ice. Ohhh! Plus that bad, bad guys would be exporting encryption. Do they have a license? Did they register with the feds? Isn't that a federal crime if they don't? Domestic laws (Switzerland) make it a federal crime, punishable by lengthy jail time to steal business information and trade secrets (it's considered industrial espionage and the authorities take a dim view on that). I run a business and my computers most definitely contains proprietary and confidential data. Not only from my company, but also from my customers, which include telcos, worldwide operating fright forwarding companies, international organisations with immunity status, etc. So, let's run that sucker, gather as much evidence as possible and then have a chat with the local DA. Provided that the DA is interested (0.7 possibility :>) does that mean that Mattels country manager is going to jail ? Most likely not. Does that mean that the local Mattel office (or their distributor) is having a real hard time and a shitload of trouble? Likely. I can possibly prove that they sucked data (unauthorized and without my knowledge) from my companies computer. They must prove that it's no confidential data which should be hard, painful & cost them a lot.
If stuff like this continues I might just be up for it.
Do those bozos actually consider that they might be breaking (criminal) laws in other counries and that the world does not only consist of the US of A?
What a bunch of wanking losers...
Ahh, it's always great catching myself in the act of being guilty of wrong-think. The fuck-shit act never really bothered me, but like so many casual press readers I had the impression of a woman capitalizing on her prominence due to the fact of being the wife of Mr. Cobain. The first attitude change came when I saw her as an actress, and a damn fine one at that. But a musician ? Serves me right, since I didn't actually bother to LISTEN. This transcript really got to me. Actually I just faxed it off to one of my best friends in the sincere hope he reads it for his enlightnment (serves him right that he still has one of those ol' thermo roll faxes). I'd order all three albums at once, but there's the fact that that transcript really triggers a guilt reflex in even thinking of buing a CD, seriously. Alright, I stop jabbering now and publicly (albeit somewhat anonymously) apologise to her for being a prejudiced idiot... /al
BTW: As ac pointed out, I'd also have liked to be at the coke concert. Specifically in the VIP lounge with all those corporate dickheads. Drug of choice ? Either the competing product or if that fails LSD oughta be fun...
That's sort of the beauty of the whole thing. The RIAA and their cronies of the motion picture industry are heading towards disaster, while being totally clueless about what's going on. When Mr. Bronfman insists on the non-anonymous internet I take offense. I say that as a person that never downloaded illegal material from the net and use it since 1992. Those greed freaks are really willing to sacrifice one of the most important values (not anonimity per se, but the right to be left alone, it's called privacy) to regain their stranglehold on the distribution channels and to keep control over the artists (hint: that's called slavery). Now for the good news: Napster goes ? Maybe, there are half a dozen companies and grass roots organisations that will replace the service instantly or are suplementing it with a decentralized and not easy killable structure. The entertainment industry? They lose. They have lost already and they are spending money, resources and energy on a totally lost cause. As soon a viable business model is up the whole distribution channels will change dramatically. Artists will be less and less willing to sell out their soul just for getting published and at the same time they will make more money. The even better news is that the more the established industries use they're energies towards one (or two or maybe three companies) the more they are doomed to fail, because time is an incredible critical factor. Read the Salon transcript if you haven't yet. It's very informative. Bye now, obsolete Dinosaurs, bye RIAA, bye Mr. Bronfman. You may go and bang yer heads now... All the power to the artists
At first I figured that Ms. Love is serving her self interest which is legitimate of course. Diving deeper into the article however, there's an anger and energy which must be admired. She reveals an artsists perspective (and yes, since seeing The people vs Larry flint I definitely consider her to be an artist and not just a blonde, arse swinging bimbo) about what really stinks in the entrtainment business. Even if taken with a lot of grains of salt, it's an unbelievable gripping speach she gave and the more I dived into it, the more credibility I gave her. Gawd, I really would have loved to be there...
Absolutely. Of course you can't stop it. The let's sue all Britney Spears fans attitude (which by the way is fine with me) is about the same approach as an oistrich, sticking his head into the sand, when somebody is just about to build an eight lane super highway over his feable body. Actually it's worse, because at least the RIAA should have the monetary resources to hire some brain power. Ah never mind... It's the same stupid idiocy as the one from the American gubinmint in their sorry attempt to ban encryption when the PGP genie was out of the bottle. The solution ? Easy: Provide VALUE to the customer regardless of the distribution channel and leave the how can we extort them best attitude away. I'm willing to bet that the contentcompany grasping this concept will get rich and then some (plus get a free vacation to Hawaii kicked in)...
No, piracy is not OK in my book and I can see why artists are very concerned about the possibilities of ripping them off big time due to digital distibution. That said, yes: I do believe that the major labels and their representing bodies are big time shmucks, completely unclear about the concept. Neverless, it's not about loss of $ and they couldn't care less about the artists they pretend to represent. It's about loss of their stranglehold of the distribution channels and more then anything else its about loss of POWER .
You recall correct...
The main difference is not the amount of boxes where the OS is running, but the fact that customers running VMS partially had a need to know what was going on in the internals of their (mission critical) systems. For a financially potent company it wouldn't have been any problem at all to acquire the VMS source code and use it to their advantage. You are correct, of course, that at that time software was an add on to the rather expensive hardware and that paradigm changed dramatically. Still, I wouldn't want to run a nuclear power plant or a space shuttle without the ability of experts looking into the inyards driving such a system.
As a previous poster pointed out, an API is certainly not the source code. However, this doesn't answer the question if Open Source software should be free. (You certainly shouldn't be charged an arm and a leg just to use the interfaces of a software product). Certainly there's no necessity that software must be given away, just because the source code is provided. There are huge efforts behind software design, coding, production, packaging, marketing and distribution. Giving the source code to the end customer might be an additional sales point if it benefits the customer. A noteable example was one of the most proprietary and (IMO) best operating systems ever: VMS. For an (significant) additional charge customers where able to purchase the source code ( afiew exceptions, like LAT applied). Did this hurt VMS ? I believe actually the opposite. Nobody went along and just copied the operating system. Certainly concepts where copied, but to do that the source code is anyway not required. Finding an analogy in my line of work (consulting in complex, huge and often distributed data management environments) I can't see any significant advantage of keeping customers, who pay a significant hourly rate, in the dark. Quite the opposite: Letting them in on my knowledge (or most of it anyway) is almost a guarantee for repeat business...
That's in my opinion of course, but I believe it was in the early eighties when the first machines with a digital display hit the market. Evil Knievel comes to mind. That's not to say that there weren't charming and exciting machines with a digital display, even during the nineties. However, the moment the clink-a-clonk digits counters where pulled off the market (and it was a darn rapid process too) was the moment where pinball went downhill...
I can see your aggrevation. However, the evil empire is not allone on this. Every major database vendor charges a (sometimes considerable, depending on the application) license fee. Frankly, having worked for a database vendor I have mixed feelings on the issue. Actually it's probably fairer towards the end user to pay a one time Internet connectivity "fine" then being licensed on a per connection base (would hurt Amazons or Yahoo's business model pretty much). This is of course in the context of a licensing model per client seat. The other side of course, is that vendors exploit the fact that end users (or licensees) don't have a choice. Knowing (some of the) software business from the inside I truely believe that it's one of the most corrupt and rotten industries in existence. That's only slightly behind arms dealers, credit card companies and time share salesmen.
Networking: DECnet was way ahead. That was developed and extended way before companies like Novell even existed and made networks popular. They lost out to tcp/ip due to (once again) stuberness. Neverless DECnet was early and superb.
Clustering. From the mid/late 80s you could just stick a few VAXes together via a part that virtually was unbreakable (starcoupler). The magic relied entirely on the software. A cluster was completely transparent to the users. You just connected to the cluster and you where assigned a session on the node with the least load. When I see what HP is doing now with Metroclusters (Year 2000 AD) the comparision comes up between a Nokia 8210 cell phone and a phone system made out of two tin cans and a thread.
There are other examples, but in a nutshell I'd blame the breakdown on:Almost religious fanatism engineering wise
Not listening to the market
Being true visionaries until middle/end 80s and then getting fat, lazy and arrogant
Missing very vital developments (PC, U*X, Work Stations, tcp/ip, etc..) and then doing to little too late
VAXman, Hallelujah, brother. I don't necessarily agree with Compaq being a good move. But for the rest you're on the dot...
They had the entire market cornered regarding mini computers in the eighties.
They had the probably (and in my opinion of course) most stable and best thought out OS at that time
They had the development framework which (up to today) you can only dream off.
They had the best darn engineering teams in the industry (label me as arrogant, but I'm truely convinced of that).
They had an extremely loyal and devoted customer base.
Lest we forget an incredible pool of tallented and partially brilliant employees.
What happened? Instead of going open (the great late 80s, early 90s buzzword) some shit-for-brain managers (and I don't mean Mr. Olsen) attempted to lock in the customer base, keep the OS as propriatary as possible and charge a shitload of money for each an everything (including software and upgrades for universities). Well, the company is defunct and not many technically knowledgeable folks really believe that a marketing oriented box assembler is really capable of delivering the required industry grade goods and services to enterprise customers. Sorry for getting carried away here. But as an ex-Deccie who experienced the probably best company in the world at that time, it hurts up to this day to see the COMPAQ logo on former DECpark due to some idiots that went to business school but have / had NO clue whatsoever.Having first hand, frustrating experiences with pre-installed, pre configured, "we give you a rescue disk, but no software" and all that crap makes me feel rather strongly on the issue. Setting up my companies blazing 1 computer infrastructure not so long ago I (like millions of others) had a choice between getting the Toshiba box I wanted either with Wank '98 or Wank NT. Attempting to be a professional enterprise I required NT of course. Obviously nobody else required this inventive, user-friendly and browser integrated OS since the distributor claimed to need a month to ship a pre-configured box. Solution: Get the Wank 98 box and cough up an additional 200$ for an NT OEM license. Happy, happy, joy, joy, but not quite: The manufacturer considered my business to be a dump for his ol' NT4 Service Pack 1 software, which of course fails to install on a 13 Gb HD. After completely wrecking the installation you try to use the "rescue" disk nothing was rescued, actually I got the feeling that more damage was done then anything else. To make a long story short, I returned the OEM version and laughed the sales guy away when he offered an aditional upgrade. The good part of the story is that I went to the next bookstore, bought S.u.S.E Linux for a mere 50 or so bucks on six CDs which apparently harmonizes just fine with 13 gig disks. Granted that even as a (fairly experienced) U*X user there is a learning curve. Granted that there are no such great features like break dancing paperclips, integrated browsers etc..., it was the best business decision ever. I yet have to install the full (400$) NT license I purchased (bad business decision) 2 weeks later. As a distributed database geek I have three industry strength databases running, if necessary in parallel and if Sybase releases Replication Server for Linux (which is rumored) I shall be a real happy camper. Especially since I bloody know what's going on on that system . Conclusion: The monopolists of this world actually push consumers into being Free Software / Open Source (take your pick) users, especially since the various distros get easier and easier to install and maintain for Average Q User and more and more businesses get serverly pissed of by broken promises and strangling license contracts...
Still on GIMP 1.0.4 though, would like to see that updated. Well, it's still the newest, stable release. I on the other side was mighty pissed about S.u.S.E, deploying the 1.1.17 developer release, which carshed on a lot of occasions. Ah well, all of us have our preferences...
Dedicated sat network: 6 billion
Maintaining a logistical infrastructure: 0.8 billion
Maintaining a reasonable billing system: 0.8 billion (that's figuring in that 60 - 70% of all costs of a telco are for customer billing).
Sales and marketing: 1.5 billion
Incidentals: 2 billion
Total: 11.1 billion bucks
Now we find cheap financing at 6% which gives annual financing costs of 670'000'000$ without a bloody call made. It could have worked as a long term investment and with a different business model. But the way those blokes set it up it was doomed. Of course I'm an outsider, since I don't use Iridium...Basically both of them, But just clogging the net with a ton of additional bandwith is just plain dumb. Oh, and the activists where just plain dumb to have all packages originate from the same IP address. After MP3s, videos, stoopid porn and DoSA clogging the net, please give me back good ol' ascii text...
When Iridium finally hit the market, enabling the purchase of a clunky handset for $3'500 enabling phone calls for 7 bucks a pop, err! a minute they left out the most important entity: The business traveller.
A lot of business travellers don't reside in the US and Korea. The US still has the problem of an 80% ananlog network, which is notoriously complicated, calls are paid by the receiver (partially) and if you really depend on your phone, Iridium might be an, allas expensive option. Why Korea didn't go for GSM escapes me.
The rest of the business world relies on GSM. Now with GSM I can exit the plane in Paris switch on my phone and place & receive calls for 40 cents a minute after thirty seconds. The same applies for Australian cities, the Indonisian djungle or a Bangkok surburb. Oh, yeah: The sicilian mountain village also provides excellent reception. Oh and all this on my neat new Nokia 8210, curtesy of Swisscom.
Those few polar scientists, astronauts and Y2K business that pay the price just don't build up critical mass.
Ergo an expensive, and outdated businessplan, ignoring not only technical development, but also half of the civilized world and no fashionable handsets. Iridium was doomed and who cares Thank you for your attention...