I submitted this to/. back in June with a note on my thoughts regarding established big biz hijacking and controling any developing net based economy.
According to the BSA attorney, they found 600 or so unlicensed copies of software there. Even if you think the BSA person is willing to lie, an allegation like that, if unsubstantiated, would have MindArk suing the BSA.
This is real software piracy, not your buddy wanting to burn a copy of Windows Longhorn OEM Final RC.9876 or whatever. If you figure licenses at a cheap rate, let's say $100 on average, that's still $60K in the hole. That's enough to pay one programmer's salary and benefits, almost.
It's not "the man" keeping MindArk down. Look at MindArk's business ethics. Do you believe their claims about being the most visited site on the internet, etc.?
I submitted this to/. back in June with a note on my thoughts regarding established big biz hijacking and controling any developing net based economy.
They're not controlling it or hijacking it. If you believe they're doing this just to shut them down, then that's one thing. But it looks like they're using valid reasons to do so.
wish I saved the rant in ascii and still can't believe it was rejected. (What? I must be new here)
Probably because you don't understand what you're talking about, and without the anti-MS slant you put on it, MindArk looks bad. If it's true that they've really got 600 unlicensed copies, fine them and bring criminal charges as well.
CD's (CD-R(W)) offer a theoretical data retention span of 20-100 years depending on who you ask. So that is safer, but still not perfect.
I've had CDs fail on me within 3 months - the data just disappeared. I made the CDs, verified them, used them a week later, but when I went to them 3 months later, they were unreadable.
These shelf lives are just projections based on laboratory tests at best.
call me naive, but LotR is one of those movies that people don't _want_ to pirate.
I know several people who had a SVCD-rip of the full movie and yet they still got the full DVD set half a year later...
It's more like we want our own copies, and we want the best available. As soon as the legal DVD packages come out, you can be sure we'll buy them, silly bookends and all. This goes beyond simply acknowledging copyrights, to acknowledging deep respect both for the written work and for the excellent production. However, there's that waiting thing.
In the past I actually showed excerpts of rips of movies about-to-be- or just- released, in order to sway people at work as to which movie we should take departmental "meetings" to go see. I don't believe in permanent copies of DivX or SVCD (my own original content I burn to DVD), but as a short-term stopgap measure, it has its uses.
Some of the phones can be "locked" to a specific carrier. Needless to say, they can also be "unlocked" but of course the carriers and manufacturers frown on that activity.
Voicestream assured me both times I bought into their service (when I got my first phone last spring, and when I got my replacement this summer) that they never lock their phones. If I find out later that they lied, I'll be upset, but so far I think they told the truth.
Also, the idea that you can swap out different GSM cards per country in the EU is like saying you can swap out different cards per state - if the local telcos in the EU were not primarily government-owned monopolies, you might see the rise of EU-wide carriers, and swapping would not be needed.
Sure, it's not seamless here, but if I'm in an area Voicestream(T-mobile) doesn't have its own presence, there's generally some other GSM provider out there my phone will jump to. I have "free" national calling both from and to any location, so I only care if my phone drops into "emergency" mode because the handoff gets fumbled. I wish that my voicemail would work seamlessly across carrier boundaries (the shortcuts, etc.) but that is less of an inconvenience than a pocket full of cards that I would have to keep track of, and keep programmed with current directories.
Since USD and EUR are currently almost the same value as each other, they should retail for 199 EUR. Anything more and your getting ripped off.
You're making an assumption that costs for all the goods and services required to produce the boxes are the same in each country. The costs of things like hard drives and memory might be significantly different, especially if they don't have the same economies of scale as whoever is building the boxes here. Even if all the boxes are built in the same place, like in Korea, you have differentials in shipping costs, differentials in marketing costs, differentials in plain old profit-taking by local distributors. There are also differentials in taxation - I believe VAT has been mentioned by others as the most obvious example, but the EU might have tariffs on some of the components or software, and so might the US, and there's nothing to assure that they'd be identical.
I find it scary that a large group of people is willing to spend their own money in order to promote shows (and even buy them?) for commercial broadcast/cable/satellite networks.
These people are not charities, you know. Sooner or later, they're going to start secretly writing in "the fan factor" when they pitch new series proposals ("I think we can get most of series 3's production paid for if we put it on hiatus midway through season 2, after this hug three-episode story, and get the fans to send us money").
As long as you're going to be sending your money to a tv network, why not petition PBS stations to show an episode? You might only be able to get them to agree to show it in the event that Sci-Fi or Fox terminates their contracts, but if those networks see that fans are trying to buy the series away, they might reconsider.
Then again, I don't know how big of an expense it would be to buy the national broadcast rights and split it up per station, especially since any station can opt out. But someone should at least punch the numbers up and see if it's a possibility.
The deal is, a lot of people worry about functionality while learning Linux or a BSD, etc. With VMWare, you can still run your old MS-Windows software in a little box, and gradually move to *nix-based tools.
When I was working high-level tech support for a major ISP, a small number of us got approval from our boss (and pissed off the IT department) to reformat our workstations, install Red Hat, and then drop the demo version of VMWare in on a trial basis, installing NT 4.0 (it was a while ago, but a lot of shops STILL use it, you know).
We could use things like Matt's Traceroute and other stuff that we normally had to ssh into production machines for, we didn't have to deal with those stupid NET MSGs from the lower level teams, and we could still use Microsoft Office apps (we had the licenses already) to fill out our expense reports and use IE for whatever internal webservers had been built using ActiveX or other IE-only stuff.
I think if you show this type of thing, you can get people hooked. Especially if you take a windows-crasher test program and show it running under WinXP vs. WinXP-in-VMWare. BSODs become a joke, a chance to say "silly old MS" and restart the virtual PC.
The accountants for small businesses should like the fact that they won't have to burn the money they paid for licenses, like I mentioned in my example. I think IT people will still grumble because for many people IT = MS (MCSE drones, etc.) and they don't want to have to learn new stuff and support it.
Sure, having 6 HBOs sounds cool, but I've got enough network/public TV to load the TiVo as it is, and HBO (as well as most cable original programming) replays all of its original programming throughout the week anyways.
Especially since the 6 channels are really just east/west feeds of 3 channels, right? =)
I'm sorry, but the idea that you want to make a cluster with duplicate firewire and other ports, not to mention the waste of extra drives, is pretty silly from a cost basis.
This is cute, but way too expensive if you're serious about clustering. Unless you really really have space issues in your rack, you can buy stripped 1G P3 machines for cheap and use those instead.
If you're clustering and you do have space issues, the optimal configuration for each unit would be to have only two connectors: power and a very high speed data bus. (One connector, if you can put power on the bus without there being surge issues for a stack:) ) Also, a processor with high internal cache makes more sense than one with less caching and more "system" memory, since pretty much all transactions should stay on the data bus.
Alternative Fueling Stations information
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Michael, please point your browser here. It's got both a station locator, and a route mapper (trip planner) so you can plan stops to refuel on long trips.
the Bond franchise has definitely jumped the shark (two words: invisible car).
On the other hand, most of us loved Wonder Woman's invisible plane. This goes to show that, contrarily to the series' directors' ideas, the more Bond becomes a cartoonish super-hero parody of himself, the less we like him.
We're getting movies made that are pre-edited for tv showings, now. I miss the Bond from the actual stories (remember books?), which at least pretended to have Bond barely scrape through, and which showed far more grey in the world.
Credit cards are also a huge liability for college students. I have more than one friend who had to drop out because they didn't use their credit card responsibly.
They're generally only a liability if used irresponsibly. Like cars, prescription drugs, their sex organs, parental rights, etc. If they don't learn how to use credit in college (what do they think their college loans are?), they'll be worse off when they hit the real world and suddenly try, then?
Tell that to the thousands who died trying to cross it --- from disease, hostile Indians, starvation, dehydration.
You missed the point entirely - gradually means, for example, that if someone's homestead is considered the last stop before the desert, and where the road and sewer and power stops, you go to the far side of them and stake a claim and build a house, and extend the road and services, then someone else makes a claim on the far side of you, and so forth. You can't send a rocket up a few hundred feet, stop, and get out and build a platform.
Also, at the time the story was written, it wasn't "cowboys and indians" any more, and I covered the supplies issue.
If your product does something useful, people will associate any name you choose with the functionality of your product
To a certain extent this is true, anyway. However, sometimes technical-sounding names, or derivatives of other names, are better for propagation, especially if they're easy to say.
"MP3" became a hit because it showed a connection to "MPEG" but wasn't "MPEG 2 Layer 3," the original name. This is probably why the "Ogg" series of names is virtually unknown outside of geeky types - what "normal" person can speak Klingon with a straight face? It's also why "DivX;-)" is always just called "DivX," even though that name really refers to an obsolete media distribution platform. This is why "MS Windows" has become known as "Windows."
the metaphor falls short with the fact that you cannot send people to harvest the Moon
It falls short far more quickly than that. You can gradually expand into a desert; there is no gravity-well-equivalent to require a geat expenditure for a small gain like the early space missions.
Also, at least while still close by, there's not as much risk of sudden death in a "mission" through the desert. If your wagon breaks down, you can look for sparse-but-extant resources to sustain you until you return (or, you know, given the timeperiod this was written, they could have used shortwave to call base and ask for help). If nothing else, you don't have to carry your environment in your wagon, just food, water, blankets, and some weapons to fend off animals.
You don't make special calculations for every bit of the trip; if you give up, you can return and sneak back into town early Sunday morning, instead of having to arive at one special spot equipped for you at noon on Friday.
Which brings up another point: spacecraft are a bit more different from cars than a long-distance wagon is from a farm wagon. The ultimate failure of this story lies in the pretense that an evolutionary progression is the same as a revolutionary leap, and that the attitudes of the people paying for each should be the same. We want to see real results, whether that be pacemakers, communications satellites, or Tang, that everyone can benefit from.
We don't want to pay for infrastructure for the rich to take vacations, or for pure science experiments that we can't immediately see results from. Give us dreams and the belief that we if we set out in our own creaky vehicles, at least some of us will make it out there, and that we won't be under the thumb of our original governments, and that we all will have a chance at better lives when we get there.
If you take good care of them, your kids will think so, too. Not many games you can pass down to them that they will think are "state of the art." And of course, there's extra fun if you teach them how to map the novels out visually, and it's a small step from there to them programming text games on a computer, either with one of the adventure engines that have entered public domain or BASIC or C or Pascal. =)
Slashdot Mirror
According to the BSA attorney, they found 600 or so unlicensed copies of software there. Even if you think the BSA person is willing to lie, an allegation like that, if unsubstantiated, would have MindArk suing the BSA.
This is real software piracy, not your buddy wanting to burn a copy of Windows Longhorn OEM Final RC
It's not "the man" keeping MindArk down. Look at MindArk's business ethics. Do you believe their claims about being the most visited site on the internet, etc.?
They're not controlling it or hijacking it. If you believe they're doing this just to shut them down, then that's one thing. But it looks like they're using valid reasons to do so.
Probably because you don't understand what you're talking about, and without the anti-MS slant you put on it, MindArk looks bad. If it's true that they've really got 600 unlicensed copies, fine them and bring criminal charges as well.
I've had CDs fail on me within 3 months - the data just disappeared. I made the CDs, verified them, used them a week later, but when I went to them 3 months later, they were unreadable.
These shelf lives are just projections based on laboratory tests at best.
The ones that someone painted with model paints to get the kinda weathered-stone look, but ended up a nasty beige.
Let me guess... those were yours? At least you got to sniff the paint remover.
Just kidding. Although the idea of me having bookends in my room is like a millipede having one shoelace for all his shoes.
It's more like we want our own copies, and we want the best available. As soon as the legal DVD packages come out, you can be sure we'll buy them, silly bookends and all. This goes beyond simply acknowledging copyrights, to acknowledging deep respect both for the written work and for the excellent production. However, there's that waiting thing.
In the past I actually showed excerpts of rips of movies about-to-be- or just- released, in order to sway people at work as to which movie we should take departmental "meetings" to go see. I don't believe in permanent copies of DivX or SVCD (my own original content I burn to DVD), but as a short-term stopgap measure, it has its uses.
Voicestream assured me both times I bought into their service (when I got my first phone last spring, and when I got my replacement this summer) that they never lock their phones. If I find out later that they lied, I'll be upset, but so far I think they told the truth.
Also, the idea that you can swap out different GSM cards per country in the EU is like saying you can swap out different cards per state - if the local telcos in the EU were not primarily government-owned monopolies, you might see the rise of EU-wide carriers, and swapping would not be needed.
Sure, it's not seamless here, but if I'm in an area Voicestream(T-mobile) doesn't have its own presence, there's generally some other GSM provider out there my phone will jump to. I have "free" national calling both from and to any location, so I only care if my phone drops into "emergency" mode because the handoff gets fumbled. I wish that my voicemail would work seamlessly across carrier boundaries (the shortcuts, etc.) but that is less of an inconvenience than a pocket full of cards that I would have to keep track of, and keep programmed with current directories.
You're making an assumption that costs for all the goods and services required to produce the boxes are the same in each country. The costs of things like hard drives and memory might be significantly different, especially if they don't have the same economies of scale as whoever is building the boxes here. Even if all the boxes are built in the same place, like in Korea, you have differentials in shipping costs, differentials in marketing costs, differentials in plain old profit-taking by local distributors. There are also differentials in taxation - I believe VAT has been mentioned by others as the most obvious example, but the EU might have tariffs on some of the components or software, and so might the US, and there's nothing to assure that they'd be identical.
I find it scary that a large group of people is willing to spend their own money in order to promote shows (and even buy them?) for commercial broadcast/cable/satellite networks.
These people are not charities, you know. Sooner or later, they're going to start secretly writing in "the fan factor" when they pitch new series proposals ("I think we can get most of series 3's production paid for if we put it on hiatus midway through season 2, after this hug three-episode story, and get the fans to send us money").
As long as you're going to be sending your money to a tv network, why not petition PBS stations to show an episode? You might only be able to get them to agree to show it in the event that Sci-Fi or Fox terminates their contracts, but if those networks see that fans are trying to buy the series away, they might reconsider.
Then again, I don't know how big of an expense it would be to buy the national broadcast rights and split it up per station, especially since any station can opt out. But someone should at least punch the numbers up and see if it's a possibility.
The deal is, a lot of people worry about functionality while learning Linux or a BSD, etc. With VMWare, you can still run your old MS-Windows software in a little box, and gradually move to *nix-based tools.
When I was working high-level tech support for a major ISP, a small number of us got approval from our boss (and pissed off the IT department) to reformat our workstations, install Red Hat, and then drop the demo version of VMWare in on a trial basis, installing NT 4.0 (it was a while ago, but a lot of shops STILL use it, you know).
We could use things like Matt's Traceroute and other stuff that we normally had to ssh into production machines for, we didn't have to deal with those stupid NET MSGs from the lower level teams, and we could still use Microsoft Office apps (we had the licenses already) to fill out our expense reports and use IE for whatever internal webservers had been built using ActiveX or other IE-only stuff.
I think if you show this type of thing, you can get people hooked. Especially if you take a windows-crasher test program and show it running under WinXP vs. WinXP-in-VMWare. BSODs become a joke, a chance to say "silly old MS" and restart the virtual PC.
The accountants for small businesses should like the fact that they won't have to burn the money they paid for licenses, like I mentioned in my example. I think IT people will still grumble because for many people IT = MS (MCSE drones, etc.) and they don't want to have to learn new stuff and support it.
I coulda sworn they make a Mozilla for MS-Windows.
Is that why the crash sequence in this movie is so much harsher than in "Generations?" At least with Window 26xx, some apps kept working...
Especially since the 6 channels are really just east/west feeds of 3 channels, right? =)
Even better, Octium IVs!
I'm not sure you want it able to go shopping on the internet while you're making use of its "peripherals."
I'm sorry, but the idea that you want to make a cluster with duplicate firewire and other ports, not to mention the waste of extra drives, is pretty silly from a cost basis.
:) ) Also, a processor with high internal cache makes more sense than one with less caching and more "system" memory, since pretty much all transactions should stay on the data bus.
This is cute, but way too expensive if you're serious about clustering. Unless you really really have space issues in your rack, you can buy stripped 1G P3 machines for cheap and use those instead.
If you're clustering and you do have space issues, the optimal configuration for each unit would be to have only two connectors: power and a very high speed data bus. (One connector, if you can put power on the bus without there being surge issues for a stack
Michael, please point your browser here. It's got both a station locator, and a route mapper (trip planner) so you can plan stops to refuel on long trips.
You must have missed A Wookie Christmas.
On the other hand, most of us loved Wonder Woman's invisible plane. This goes to show that, contrarily to the series' directors' ideas, the more Bond becomes a cartoonish super-hero parody of himself, the less we like him.
We're getting movies made that are pre-edited for tv showings, now. I miss the Bond from the actual stories (remember books?), which at least pretended to have Bond barely scrape through, and which showed far more grey in the world.
Reading comments like this makes me realize we need a +1 non-U.S. comment filter, or at least a +1 country-of-story's-origin filter.
I find these comments so much more insightful than '[X]sucks! Why do you [X]?' comments. To those people, I say: try reading before posting.
Ah, but you're forgetting the last rule of debates: if you can't attack the opponent's arguments, attack the opponent's character.
Some people come here treating everyone like opponents.
Because you want to train for Solaris certification without buying yet another box?
They're generally only a liability if used irresponsibly. Like cars, prescription drugs, their sex organs, parental rights, etc. If they don't learn how to use credit in college (what do they think their college loans are?), they'll be worse off when they hit the real world and suddenly try, then?
You missed the point entirely - gradually means, for example, that if someone's homestead is considered the last stop before the desert, and where the road and sewer and power stops, you go to the far side of them and stake a claim and build a house, and extend the road and services, then someone else makes a claim on the far side of you, and so forth. You can't send a rocket up a few hundred feet, stop, and get out and build a platform.
Also, at the time the story was written, it wasn't "cowboys and indians" any more, and I covered the supplies issue.
To a certain extent this is true, anyway. However, sometimes technical-sounding names, or derivatives of other names, are better for propagation, especially if they're easy to say.
"MP3" became a hit because it showed a connection to "MPEG" but wasn't "MPEG 2 Layer 3," the original name. This is probably why the "Ogg" series of names is virtually unknown outside of geeky types - what "normal" person can speak Klingon with a straight face? It's also why "DivX
On the other hand, there's also "Xerox"...
It falls short far more quickly than that. You can gradually expand into a desert; there is no gravity-well-equivalent to require a geat expenditure for a small gain like the early space missions.
Also, at least while still close by, there's not as much risk of sudden death in a "mission" through the desert. If your wagon breaks down, you can look for sparse-but-extant resources to sustain you until you return (or, you know, given the timeperiod this was written, they could have used shortwave to call base and ask for help). If nothing else, you don't have to carry your environment in your wagon, just food, water, blankets, and some weapons to fend off animals.
You don't make special calculations for every bit of the trip; if you give up, you can return and sneak back into town early Sunday morning, instead of having to arive at one special spot equipped for you at noon on Friday.
Which brings up another point: spacecraft are a bit more different from cars than a long-distance wagon is from a farm wagon. The ultimate failure of this story lies in the pretense that an evolutionary progression is the same as a revolutionary leap, and that the attitudes of the people paying for each should be the same. We want to see real results, whether that be pacemakers, communications satellites, or Tang, that everyone can benefit from.
We don't want to pay for infrastructure for the rich to take vacations, or for pure science experiments that we can't immediately see results from. Give us dreams and the belief that we if we set out in our own creaky vehicles, at least some of us will make it out there, and that we won't be under the thumb of our original governments, and that we all will have a chance at better lives when we get there.
Wagons, ho!
If you take good care of them, your kids will think so, too.
Not many games you can pass down to them that they will think are "state of the art." And of course, there's extra fun if you teach them how to map the novels out visually, and it's a small step from there to them programming text games on a computer, either with one of the adventure engines that have entered public domain or BASIC or C or Pascal. =)