I have a simple question for the believers:
on
Roswell Declassified
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Why haven't any corrupt government officials made money off the technology, yet, if this is true?
Why haven't we seen huge revolutionary leaps in technology beyond what we'd expect with Kondratiev and other cycles, instead of just jumps along an evolutionary scale?
Sure, they could keep it secret for a while, but 60 years later is a long time.
Nothing meatier than the summary in the body of it, either.
History of antacids? Whatever. There's nothing especially finger-biting or stomach-churning mentioned in the text, except for a picture of a woman sticking "magnetic wires" "the size of a human hair" into an early computer with circuit boards that swing down - the "wireframe book," apparently.
I'd have loved to have read about how difficult it was to keep materials from being contaminated with dust (shed skin flakes), etc., before launch, or how they decided to shield the circuitry from radiation, and what kinds of weight tradeoffs came up, etc.
But the huge "problems list" section, which takes roughly a third of the article, actually doesn't detail problems, but just things like how the list was made, and how nobody would get in trouble for adding things to the list, and other yay-team filler.
Overall, the whole thing reads like a one-sheet poster for a cheap hands-on museum display. Very disappointing.
Encouraging people to waste SCO's bandwidth because they're being stupid is petty and immoral.
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine and moral for you to "vote" by preparing statements for any court case that will result, warning any of your friends in IT who have just returned from a 6 month spelunking adventure that SCO's management can't be sane if they think they can revoke pre-existing licenses, and therefore you don't think they should ever risk future business with SCO, and selling short their stock (assuming you still can).
You don't complain about someone not playing nice by playing naughty yourself. You do it by being scrupulously decent. The resulting contrast makes it all the more obvious how wrong they are to anyone watching, by the way.
p.s. if you don't believe the morality argument, that's fine. Think of this, however: would you rather that SCO lose all its money to hosting companies, ISPs, and telecoms, or to a Linux-and-open-source-promoting vendor like IBM? And I ask that as someone who misses his ISP job, even:)
As for why we don't hang better pictures on a wall is that even without expensive artworks our guest rooms cost around AU$850,00.00+ each to outfit already and as long as it matches the decore no-one notices the "average" art piece
How many tvs do you have to replace per year because customers break them? Would this cost increase or decrease with these new tvs? I suppose that would depend on how most of them break, right? Like if they're all tossed out of windows, and the new tvs are mounted in the wall, the costs would go down because they'd be less likely to rip them out of the wall. On the other hand, if people throw stuff at the tvs, and they sometimes break, they might be more likely to get damaged, if they have a flexi screen instead of the tempered glass of a CRT. Not to mention that you'd have a harder time replacing the tv if it does break...
It is in the lobby and other public areas thta the "good" art goes. So that our staff can ensure it doesn't go walkies.
That's odd. I'd think that the public areas would be more likely to have stuff stolen or damaged, simply from higher traffic, nonguests, and people who know you can't tag it to them unless you have a security camera there, whereas if it's in the customer's room, if it's broken or gone, you have a pretty good guess who you can charge for it, right?
Well, I have a confession to make, then, also, just so you don't feel bad:
Remember what I said about the PPPOE and ICS and a star config with one NIC on the gateway, and all that?
I actually ran that for a while when I was living with my parents, before moving out. It was dog-slow when they'd be on their box though, sometimes, because ICS isn't exactly very efficient, and bouncing it in and out across the same segment didn't help. Plus, they couldn't turn off their box, or I'd be screwed. Not to mention that I had to get a third-party PPPOE adapter to get it working, because the stupid spyware-laden CD that the ISP wanted us to use wouldn't work with ICS anyway. I moved out (got a promotion, moved out of state) before I put in a real router, but I bought a router and another switch before even getting DSL at my new place. Then when I moved back in (got laid off) I gave them the router and changed the layout of the network.
I wrote all that in case anyone out there is thinking of doing something similar. It's doable, but you're much better off either making a gateway or buying a cheap one (which also uses less power, is silent, isn't as likely to have parts fail, and has firmware pre-loaded) unless you're absolutely without funds. Did I mention that ZoneAlarm wouldn't work with ICS back then, either?:)
I could rewrite the IPtables if I were smart enough but I'm rather new to Linux, I've been a Linux user less than a year.
The EASY thing to do was to add a third nic that is just naked. It's unfiltered so all traffic that it needs gets through. So far it's worked well.
Good reason. Easy is always good. Someday, you might try to route the unfiltered block to the same NIC as the filtered block, just to see that it can be done, but no need to break what works, certainly.
The cool part about routing both that way is, if you or your friends want an unfiltered port temporarily, you just manually assign the box in question one of the IPs from he unfiltered block your son is using - you don't have to run another cable, or mess with anything else. Of course, maybe your friend likes to hog your bandwidth with p2p, in which case telling them it's all filtered is just fine:)
Anyway, I'm just glad you didn't hit me with "it's bad form to run a DMZ block and a filtered block on the same interface!" I'm sure some people think that's true, and there are cases when it's risky, but I just think about all those little Cisco routers sitting on T1s (or even higher) that have just one ether port off them and multiple assigned blocks, or one assigned block and also DHCP set up with private IP space, so I know that in practice a lot of DMZs aren't physically isolated - it can't be all that scary.:)
Several of the games want huge chunks of ports opened up. Uh uh. Not gonna do that. So I added the third nic as a DMZ (smoothwall calls it "Orange Zone") so that the PS2 has unhindered access to the web.
There are three nics, red=nic to modem (dhcp) orange= nic to PS2 - 192.168.2.1 green=nic to my lan - 192.168.1.1
Okay, I'm still a little confused. (Read my suppositions about your reason here, if you like)
Can you not assign more than one block to a NIC? Assigning them as two discrete/24s instead of one/23, of course. Or did you just want to physically isolate your DMZ as well?
Maybe you just wanted to play with 3 NICs in one box? You can admit it, I'd understand! I'd find that to be fun, too.
I've always thought it more technically freaky to do it all with one NIC in the gateway, and have the switch in the middle of the "star," though. Doing it that way means you can build smaller, even cheaper and lower-powered boxes if you need to. It works fine for PPPOE, even with Microsoft's ICS, but won't work for you, of course, because you can't let RR see your boxes or try to assign them IPs directly.
One nic goes to my RR cable modem, one nic goes to my switch and one nic is for my son's Playstation 2.
He's assigning IP via DHCP either way, probably, and the switch would be easier.
There's only three possible advantages I can see to this setup.
if he has so much traffic between those networked computers and the gateway he built that he's worried about saturating the segment between the switch and the gateway, or saturating the switch. Saturation shouldn't happen between the switch and the gateway, however, even if he's got a T1 or a 3MBps SDSL line, so unless he's saturating the switch itself with constant transfers between networked computers, it should be a non-issue.
He might be worried about someone hacking into his son's PS/2 and then scouting around inside the network, but he doesn't have to have them on separate NICs to give them separate private IP space; he could always assign IPs by MACs, with one block for his machines and another block for his son. Or just assign them out "permanently." Or some other variation (DHCP is best in case he has guests who want to just plug in, or a laptop he takes to work).
His son's PS/2 may be too far from the switch, but close to the gateway. This is probably the case.
So I'm also really curious as to why he chose this arrangement... if it's not the third reason, I hope he shares his reason with us, because undoubtedly I could learn from it.
Fireawlls are not the answer, really.. they mask problems. Firewalls should be the very last step in your security initiative.
Yes and no. If you rely solely on firewalls, yes, because firewalls just contain damage and prevent it spreading. You definitely still have to take care of the weak security on the affected machine(s). However, if you think of security as an ongoing effort (i.e. no "last step"), you'll see that monitoring your firewall may give you much quicker notification of abnormal activity.
Personally, I much prefer to be warned by port scans, etc., than to rely solely on hardening for protection from attacks. It's like having a fence around your house, with a gate in front, and having a burglar standing outside, rattling the front gate, yelling "hey, I'm about to try to break into your house!" He might get over the fence or through the gate, but you'd be awfully stupid, if you knew some burglers did that, not to at least have the wall and the gate.
Carrying the metaphor a little too far, of course, it's a heck of a lot easier to track the guy down and "remove the threat," if you know he's going to try something, and where he is, before he does tries it.
Interesting that the developers are saying "stick a fork in it, it's not done."
Especially, on a more serious note, given the speculation in other comments that this breakaway crew might be trying to make this "tine" of the fork more in line with J2EE.
I really can't say any more about this, however. I don't really know anything about this rift thing with Sun, I just wanted to be funny:)
With people walking up and driving away with perfect copies, suddenly your car has no value
Not true. Your car may no longer have value to strangers (except as a "master" to make copies from), but you conceivably have sentimental ties. Also, a copy is a snapshot of how something existed at a certain time. Your car gets more dents, and more memories are created in it as you continue to have it, which the copies do not share. (Yet another reason this metaphor doesn't really work - a recorded performance doesn't change)
Let's substitute the idea of cloning babies for copying cars. If you could clone your own child so that other families could have children, does that make your child any less important? No. In fact, in a sense, it makes him "first among equals."
Come Friday, everybody will be happily running unlicensed copies of AIX in the knowledge that IT WON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE
Except that licenses prior to this threatened expiration are still valid. SCO is really telling a bald-faced lie when it claims that it can de-license people who already have licenses.
So, in other words, next time your wife and you decide on the spur of the moment to go and get a movie, instead of getting in your vehicle and driving to the DVD store, you simply walk over to your DVD player and pick one of the movies that you have lying about that you'd already decided you wanted to watch.
I'm not sure about this, at least not in my case. Whenever I had access to a friend's cd changer, I always wanted a cd not in the selection. When I see jukeboxes in yuppie retro diners, I want music they don't have. I have dozens of DVDs that I've paid for, but have never seen, because "I can always do that later."
Netflix sounds cool, especially if they carry a lot of arthouse and indie films (I actually expect these genres to get a boost in public tastes as a result of Netflix, just like when the Sundance Channel and IFC started up). But I am still thinking that I'll have this problem of never wanting what I have available:)
And after that take out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal listing the board of directors, their names, their addresses, and how much money they lost for SCO while contributing to it's demise. Plus any additional tidbits that might make them unemployable in the future.
You can't just burn. You have to remember to salt.
Mod parent up for being my new best-Slashdot-friend!
Once upon a time, with their iconoclastic subject matter and interviewees, lower-east-side-art-school-drop-out color schemes and layouts, all close on a decade ago, Wired was 'da bomb.' They were tekno/geek/cool, just around the time when it was becoming "cool" to be "geek." Their claim to that cache is long past.
Actually, the early Wired owed a lot to the evern-earlier Mondo 2000, which had more extreme layouts (some unreadable), more drugs ("smart" and really dumb), and "geek fashion" articles, as well as many of the same writers.
Now they've lost some of the extreme layouts (good) but, since Conde Nast owns them, have added more fashion-type advertising and advertorials (bad).
You know, they used to be really cool, not because of all of the above, but because they'd have articles by Neal Stephenson and other science fiction writers, as well as those by actual, real economists, etc., and not just some journalist-turned-talking-head. Now they're turning into the next Omni. I predict they'll start touting "longevity" as a big buzzword, so they can sell special-editions on the newsstand to 50-somethings who want reassurance that someone, somewhere, isn't laughing at their desire to have their heads frozen.
Amen to that. Here's what I would do in IBM's position.
1) Buy out SCO. Hostile style. Buy up enough of the stock to have them vote to merge under IBM. 2) Fire the entire board of directors. A severance package of one pack of oreos and cab fare 3) ?????? 4) Profit....or at least not losing money on this crap, which is the next best thing.
They'd be losing money based on the current overvaluation of the stock. Even if they fire the directors, they all walk out with pockets bulging from their stock options, etc., don't they? This path also encourages other frivolous or deceitful lawsuits against them.
No, for substantially less, they should take them to court, stomp on them, drive their stock value into the ground, and make those guys feel pain in their wallets. This costs them less up front, keeps them from having to clean mouse guts off their feet, and certainly shows all the other little vermin that they need to make sure they have a real claim before going against the elephant.
this would be true if...
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is still excessive capacity in this space and because of this nobody can charge enough to cover operating costs. You will see this change when the capacity is eliminated and all the smaller players are starved out. When this happens watch out the cost of hosting services will go through the roof and the small number of companies left standing should do well.
The problem with this idea is that there is no significant barrier to entry in the low-end colo or hosting market, other than running fiber to a facility. As soon as the rates for hosting go up, a lot of people will look for cheaper ones, and you'll see another crop of low-end companies start up.
Don't forget that even that barrier is significantly reduced by the fact that the capacity is always there on most of that dark fiber, so they have an incentive to sell it, as long as they haven't pulled it out of the ground and turned off the power to it. Not to mention that Verio and other former players in the big data center market will still be looking to get out from under some of the leases for their closed facilities, for at least the next couple of years. Even if they default on their leases, the building owners will be much happier leasing you the facility as is instead of having to rip out all the heavy infrastructure modding.:) Especially since the real estate market in a lot of the places where data centers went in didn't exactly improve...
Hosting's going to be a commodity market for a long time, if not from now on, I think.
Re:This really doesn't make sense....
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
How could they not make a profit off this? Is maintaince costs still so high even with no expansion? They were CLOSING data centers not buiding them.
When they bought the data centers, they also bought all the contracts for leasing, etc., which probably run for several more years.
Ask companies like Verio about the bloodbath when they shut most of their new data centers down, but were left with 5 or 10 year contracts for those spaces, sometimes in extremely expensive locations. A lot of the equipment, like the big chillers and the fire suppression systems, probably still hasn't been paid for, either.
C&W is looking at with its data centers, I'm sure. Not to mention that they probably have a lot of fiber sitting dark (unused) right now, and lots more under contracts for less than the fixed costs. The salesmen for most of these carriers, by 1999, 2000 and 2001, undercut each other to the point where they were writing money-losing contracts, just to meet their quotas and get their commissions. And quite often, the contracts went to companies that then cancelled or went out of business when the bubble burst.
That's not right. With the same sentence you're saying that's right to have kids working on sweatshops provided that they (or their parents) have signed an agreement.
There are contracts that conflict with laws and law is always right in that matter, making contracts void.
How can you leap from a legal contract that owns IP developed while employed to sweatshops (which presumably violated OSHA and minimum wage laws)?
A contract clause regarding developed IP like this is legal. Many companies use them.
I've worked for companies before that have draconian contracts, "Anything you think is our property! Hah!"
If you take the contract, you shouldn't complain about the conditions later. I don't mean just you, Xerithane, personally, but anyone in general, and him especially. If he really agreed to this kind of contract, he's given AOL the high road in this matter.
Besides that, even if he worked on it completely independently, without Nullsoft resources, and without a contract giving all IP developed during employment to AOL, they're still free to refuse to let it sit on corporate servers, where it generates legal liability and bandwidth costs for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why haven't any corrupt government officials made money off the technology, yet, if this is true?
Why haven't we seen huge revolutionary leaps in technology beyond what we'd expect with Kondratiev and other cycles, instead of just jumps along an evolutionary scale?
Sure, they could keep it secret for a while, but 60 years later is a long time.
Nothing meatier than the summary in the body of it, either.
History of antacids? Whatever. There's nothing especially finger-biting or stomach-churning mentioned in the text, except for a picture of a woman sticking "magnetic wires" "the size of a human hair" into an early computer with circuit boards that swing down - the "wireframe book," apparently.
I'd have loved to have read about how difficult it was to keep materials from being contaminated with dust (shed skin flakes), etc., before launch, or how they decided to shield the circuitry from radiation, and what kinds of weight tradeoffs came up, etc.
But the huge "problems list" section, which takes roughly a third of the article, actually doesn't detail problems, but just things like how the list was made, and how nobody would get in trouble for adding things to the list, and other yay-team filler.
Overall, the whole thing reads like a one-sheet poster for a cheap hands-on museum display. Very disappointing.
Encouraging people to waste SCO's bandwidth because they're being stupid is petty and immoral.
:)
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine and moral for you to "vote" by preparing statements for any court case that will result, warning any of your friends in IT who have just returned from a 6 month spelunking adventure that SCO's management can't be sane if they think they can revoke pre-existing licenses, and therefore you don't think they should ever risk future business with SCO, and selling short their stock (assuming you still can).
You don't complain about someone not playing nice by playing naughty yourself. You do it by being scrupulously decent. The resulting contrast makes it all the more obvious how wrong they are to anyone watching, by the way.
p.s. if you don't believe the morality argument, that's fine. Think of this, however: would you rather that SCO lose all its money to hosting companies, ISPs, and telecoms, or to a Linux-and-open-source-promoting vendor like IBM? And I ask that as someone who misses his ISP job, even
How many tvs do you have to replace per year because customers break them? Would this cost increase or decrease with these new tvs? I suppose that would depend on how most of them break, right? Like if they're all tossed out of windows, and the new tvs are mounted in the wall, the costs would go down because they'd be less likely to rip them out of the wall. On the other hand, if people throw stuff at the tvs, and they sometimes break, they might be more likely to get damaged, if they have a flexi screen instead of the tempered glass of a CRT. Not to mention that you'd have a harder time replacing the tv if it does break...
That's odd. I'd think that the public areas would be more likely to have stuff stolen or damaged, simply from higher traffic, nonguests, and people who know you can't tag it to them unless you have a security camera there, whereas if it's in the customer's room, if it's broken or gone, you have a pretty good guess who you can charge for it, right?
So I could watch horror movies without my sister sneaking up behind me?
Well, I have a confession to make, then, also, just so you don't feel bad:
Remember what I said about the PPPOE and ICS and a star config with one NIC on the gateway, and all that?
I actually ran that for a while when I was living with my parents, before moving out. It was dog-slow when they'd be on their box though, sometimes, because ICS isn't exactly very efficient, and bouncing it in and out across the same segment didn't help. Plus, they couldn't turn off their box, or I'd be screwed. Not to mention that I had to get a third-party PPPOE adapter to get it working, because the stupid spyware-laden CD that the ISP wanted us to use wouldn't work with ICS anyway. I moved out (got a promotion, moved out of state) before I put in a real router, but I bought a router and another switch before even getting DSL at my new place. Then when I moved back in (got laid off) I gave them the router and changed the layout of the network.
I wrote all that in case anyone out there is thinking of doing something similar. It's doable, but you're much better off either making a gateway or buying a cheap one (which also uses less power, is silent, isn't as likely to have parts fail, and has firmware pre-loaded) unless you're absolutely without funds. Did I mention that ZoneAlarm wouldn't work with ICS back then, either?
Good reason. Easy is always good.
Someday, you might try to route the unfiltered block to the same NIC as the filtered block, just to see that it can be done, but no need to break what works, certainly.
The cool part about routing both that way is, if you or your friends want an unfiltered port temporarily, you just manually assign the box in question one of the IPs from he unfiltered block your son is using - you don't have to run another cable, or mess with anything else. Of course, maybe your friend likes to hog your bandwidth with p2p, in which case telling them it's all filtered is just fine
Anyway, I'm just glad you didn't hit me with "it's bad form to run a DMZ block and a filtered block on the same interface!" I'm sure some people think that's true, and there are cases when it's risky, but I just think about all those little Cisco routers sitting on T1s (or even higher) that have just one ether port off them and multiple assigned blocks, or one assigned block and also DHCP set up with private IP space, so I know that in practice a lot of DMZs aren't physically isolated - it can't be all that scary.
Okay, I'm still a little confused. (Read my suppositions about your reason here, if you like)
Can you not assign more than one block to a NIC? Assigning them as two discrete
Maybe you just wanted to play with 3 NICs in one box? You can admit it, I'd understand! I'd find that to be fun, too.
I've always thought it more technically freaky to do it all with one NIC in the gateway, and have the switch in the middle of the "star," though. Doing it that way means you can build smaller, even cheaper and lower-powered boxes if you need to. It works fine for PPPOE, even with Microsoft's ICS, but won't work for you, of course, because you can't let RR see your boxes or try to assign them IPs directly.
Except he says he has a switch, already:
He's assigning IP via DHCP either way, probably, and the switch would be easier.
There's only three possible advantages I can see to this setup.
So I'm also really curious as to why he chose this arrangement... if it's not the third reason, I hope he shares his reason with us, because undoubtedly I could learn from it.
Yes and no. If you rely solely on firewalls, yes, because firewalls just contain damage and prevent it spreading. You definitely still have to take care of the weak security on the affected machine(s). However, if you think of security as an ongoing effort (i.e. no "last step"), you'll see that monitoring your firewall may give you much quicker notification of abnormal activity.
Personally, I much prefer to be warned by port scans, etc., than to rely solely on hardening for protection from attacks. It's like having a fence around your house, with a gate in front, and having a burglar standing outside, rattling the front gate, yelling "hey, I'm about to try to break into your house!" He might get over the fence or through the gate, but you'd be awfully stupid, if you knew some burglers did that, not to at least have the wall and the gate.
Carrying the metaphor a little too far, of course, it's a heck of a lot easier to track the guy down and "remove the threat," if you know he's going to try something, and where he is, before he does tries it.
If only I could do that self-licking thing, like they do afterwards. Why do they even bother with the middle?
Especially, on a more serious note, given the speculation in other comments that this breakaway crew might be trying to make this "tine" of the fork more in line with J2EE.
I really can't say any more about this, however. I don't really know anything about this rift thing with Sun, I just wanted to be funny
French amateur porn site, maybe: "J'ai votre tour d'Eiffel dans mon pantalon, bébé!"
(I gots yer Eiffel Tower... in my pants, baby!)
Nope, sorry, a basketball site won't work.
I thought about it, but you know what they're like... nothing but
Just imagine:
etc.
Hm... a.la, ah.la and al.la are already registered, too. so I can't start that e-biz project, Mumford's Sandwich and Magic Shop, either.
This sucks!
So does this mean that, if they want to use the JBoss name for their independent work, Mark Fleury says to "fork off and die?"
Not true. Your car may no longer have value to strangers (except as a "master" to make copies from), but you conceivably have sentimental ties. Also, a copy is a snapshot of how something existed at a certain time. Your car gets more dents, and more memories are created in it as you continue to have it, which the copies do not share. (Yet another reason this metaphor doesn't really work - a recorded performance doesn't change)
Let's substitute the idea of cloning babies for copying cars. If you could clone your own child so that other families could have children, does that make your child any less important? No. In fact, in a sense, it makes him "first among equals."
Except that licenses prior to this threatened expiration are still valid. SCO is really telling a bald-faced lie when it claims that it can de-license people who already have licenses.
I'm not sure about this, at least not in my case. Whenever I had access to a friend's cd changer, I always wanted a cd not in the selection. When I see jukeboxes in yuppie retro diners, I want music they don't have. I have dozens of DVDs that I've paid for, but have never seen, because "I can always do that later."
Netflix sounds cool, especially if they carry a lot of arthouse and indie films (I actually expect these genres to get a boost in public tastes as a result of Netflix, just like when the Sundance Channel and IFC started up). But I am still thinking that I'll have this problem of never wanting what I have available
Mod parent up for being my new best-Slashdot-friend!
Ooh, I like you. =)
Actually, the early Wired owed a lot to the evern-earlier Mondo 2000, which had more extreme layouts (some unreadable), more drugs ("smart" and really dumb), and "geek fashion" articles, as well as many of the same writers.
Now they've lost some of the extreme layouts (good) but, since Conde Nast owns them, have added more fashion-type advertising and advertorials (bad).
You know, they used to be really cool, not because of all of the above, but because they'd have articles by Neal Stephenson and other science fiction writers, as well as those by actual, real economists, etc., and not just some journalist-turned-talking-head. Now they're turning into the next Omni. I predict they'll start touting "longevity" as a big buzzword, so they can sell special-editions on the newsstand to 50-somethings who want reassurance that someone, somewhere, isn't laughing at their desire to have their heads frozen.
They'd be losing money based on the current overvaluation of the stock. Even if they fire the directors, they all walk out with pockets bulging from their stock options, etc., don't they? This path also encourages other frivolous or deceitful lawsuits against them.
No, for substantially less, they should take them to court, stomp on them, drive their stock value into the ground, and make those guys feel pain in their wallets. This costs them less up front, keeps them from having to clean mouse guts off their feet, and certainly shows all the other little vermin that they need to make sure they have a real claim before going against the elephant.
The problem with this idea is that there is no significant barrier to entry in the low-end colo or hosting market, other than running fiber to a facility. As soon as the rates for hosting go up, a lot of people will look for cheaper ones, and you'll see another crop of low-end companies start up.
Don't forget that even that barrier is significantly reduced by the fact that the capacity is always there on most of that dark fiber, so they have an incentive to sell it, as long as they haven't pulled it out of the ground and turned off the power to it. Not to mention that Verio and other former players in the big data center market will still be looking to get out from under some of the leases for their closed facilities, for at least the next couple of years. Even if they default on their leases, the building owners will be much happier leasing you the facility as is instead of having to rip out all the heavy infrastructure modding.
Hosting's going to be a commodity market for a long time, if not from now on, I think.
When they bought the data centers, they also bought all the contracts for leasing, etc., which probably run for several more years.
Ask companies like Verio about the bloodbath when they shut most of their new data centers down, but were left with 5 or 10 year contracts for those spaces, sometimes in extremely expensive locations. A lot of the equipment, like the big chillers and the fire suppression systems, probably still hasn't been paid for, either.
C&W is looking at with its data centers, I'm sure. Not to mention that they probably have a lot of fiber sitting dark (unused) right now, and lots more under contracts for less than the fixed costs. The salesmen for most of these carriers, by 1999, 2000 and 2001, undercut each other to the point where they were writing money-losing contracts, just to meet their quotas and get their commissions. And quite often, the contracts went to companies that then cancelled or went out of business when the bubble burst.
How can you leap from a legal contract that owns IP developed while employed to sweatshops (which presumably violated OSHA and minimum wage laws)?
A contract clause regarding developed IP like this is legal. Many companies use them.
If you take the contract, you shouldn't complain about the conditions later. I don't mean just you, Xerithane, personally, but anyone in general, and him especially. If he really agreed to this kind of contract, he's given AOL the high road in this matter.
Besides that, even if he worked on it completely independently, without Nullsoft resources, and without a contract giving all IP developed during employment to AOL, they're still free to refuse to let it sit on corporate servers, where it generates legal liability and bandwidth costs for them.