I was in the same situation most of my school life, I never fit in because I
was in a schooldistrict where you looked and acted the same as everyone else or you didn't
get accepted(this changed in High School by the way when i could choose my own classes,
and then could choose to be with kids who were actually intelligent and wanted to learn, but in
the lower 1-8 grades they seem to like to keep things mixed up, so you must become part of
the lowest common denominator) Anyway, there are two ways to help the problem, both of which
work pretty well:
1. Nearly every school has a Honors/gifted student program of some sort, convince the school
he belongs there, and NOT with the lowest common demoninator. He will be with people
of his own caliber, and perhaps even more interested in his school work. This can be hard if he
is like I was, and bored with the work, and therefore only getting average grades(I didn't excel,
until i was challenged I was just plain bnored and didn't care, i considered everything busy work,
and yes Schools really do give more busy work to the lowest common denominator, I had
a teacher as much as admit it once) He might excel, he might even fail but either way socially
he will be better off.
2. This is the harder part you might agree with less. Teach him to fight, now hear me out.
On almost a yearly basis someone would decide to push too far, but I Knew how to fight, although
I avoided it. In the end I would stand up to them, and eventually this poor person having run
out of words would try to talk with a fist instead. I never started a fight, but I always finished it,
and in the end the tomenting would end for a while, usually the result of a couple black eyes,
and once or twice a broken nose. usually this led to a 2-5 days suspension, but it was worth it.
(Twice the administration of the school was so happy that someone had finally knocked the bully
of the year down to size they didn't even suspend me, because of the other guys rep)
UGH, station has been going down hill for years. Well thats alright I never listened to their net stream much since they switched to Real audion and it sounded like I was stuck underwater. I told them they really should use shout/ice cast intead, but they avoided the issue.
In any case my.02 the DJ's get paid to do their show, how the station broadcasts the show shouldn't matter.
Yes, I have infact and the people I worked with in everycase were very helpful. In onecase they offered their software for free, but did charge for support. Therefore the calls they got for support were actually worthwhile calls, things that were really broke, and not dumb stuff. The other was a vendor of a high scale app that carged a high fee for support, I also had to pay for the app, bt again because it was their main revenue stream to get paid for support they were very helpful.
Once the internet"Cyberstate" is recognized as what t s and we all can get represenation of our ideals in the real world maybe...until then, there is nothing you can do.
3 things need to happen.
1. A "standard" for internet signiture needs to exist, and it needs to be free for all, but back by a recognizable, non-corruptable source. PGP, is close, but to be usefully valid if needs a trusted key system that only the Veri$igns of the world can offer. We need a company to step up and offer key signing/checking for everyone for free(People, businesses, everyone) This will make the emailing of Congressmen. etc useful, right now they trash most of those emails, they can't verify they actually came from someone in their district. So generally the flood of email we generate is useless.
2. On the same point, congressmen need to start reading email, or even recognizing the medium entirely.
3. The hard one, our reps need to start voting te way we ask them to vote not how they thing they should vote. I recently participated in a campaign to get my local rep to vote a certain way on an issue(it was net related). He instead played party politics, and let the lobbiests pretty much buy his vote. I have often thought of running for a seat in local govenment and then using a web site to poll the people on how they want me to vote. We need to get back to for the people by the people which is not how American govenment works anymore. its more or less for the companies, by the lobbiests, and political parties.
Obviously you don't actually have the balls to face up to you opinions since you Posted as an AC. Next time at least have the presence of mind to face up to your opinion you sackless wonder. I might take it more seriously.
And by the way its not an attitude that everything should be free, I am willing to pay for quality. But it turns out the best stuff is free, companies should make their money on the real commodity, support. And as far as MP3's musicians should make their money doing their job touring!
I give up on Microsoft operating systems to do any real work. I'll stick with Linux and ABCDE to record my Mp3s thank you, simple quick, quality and painless. Why can't MS just realize that the people who truely want to do these things(the whole world should realize this in general) will find a way to do it. No matter what imposed limits, or protection they try to impliment we will get around it. Its a geeks, right, and Mission to do so.
I had a Chemistry professor in college, who was blind(UMASS Amherst). If he could do chemistry expirements(and proctor exams, figure that one out, and he did catch people cheating on occasion), I gotta figure there are blind programmers, etc out there too! For this guy it was all a game of knowing what was where, I think. I fact a friend of mine once messed with him and swiched the oder of several containers on the lab table before a lecture. The professor, stopped for a second during the lecture, switched the containers back to the proper order, and simply commented "nice try".
There are several companies out there that will do the storage for you, for pennies on the dollar of what you are doing now. These places allow you to send the data to them via Internet, or even on you local lan, to medium in the data center. They store the data in EMC Symmetrix Boxes. Highly reliable, highly redundant configurations, with off site mirroring capablities. I have worked for a couple companies who did this. Very reliable, and generally inexpensive to use in the long run, and much easier to catalouge and manage especially when you need the data back.
I think it is possible. The real problem is its improbable. There are at least two factors making it impossible to get anywhere with the DSL market.
1. The real promise of DSL is high quality, high speed internet connections, always on, always available. Unfortunately those that are rolling out DSL are not living up to the promise, in the way's that people expect. I have had both DSL and Cable Modem in the past year, actually I still do...infact my company has both, for different purposes. In general people expect DSL to live up to the promised speeds, with the reliability we expect from the Phone company(Say what you will, but I can remember at least 100 times the power has gone out at my house but the phone is still working, NO ONE lives up to the kind of service except the phone company). DSL is not POTS though, but we are told its a phone type tech so we expect that level of service from it. More so since its a phone tech for getting on the internet we expect it to cost the same as that 56K dialup we have been using for years. The more informed DSL might even recognize the technology shift, and resultant price increase for what it is(I do anyway) and expect to pay more for this kind of access, BUT not what the DSL companies want to charge, COVAD charging $359 for 1.5 Symetric is just way out of line.(I would pay up to $100, and think most others would too, $100 a month is well within the typical geek budget, $359 is alittle insane) Now hold on let me give you the reason I think this so, before you fly of the Flame handle at me. I have one of these $359 line from Covad, but I also have a AT&T/Mediaone(Whoever they are this week) cable modem at the same site(remember they are for different reasons, if your truely interested in the details I can fill them in later) for $39.99 a month a get 1.5 down, and a variable speed up which varies between 300-1.1 according to my monitors. The DSL is the rock soild connectivity to the site, the Cable modem serves other purposes really just an administrative connection that doesn't effect the datasteam of my customers.
So basically what I can deduce from all this is a question of volume, and/or administrative costing being the problem. A good look at this reveals how to fit the situation. Any DSL company is reliant on the TELco(s) in the area to get that line to the users house/business(A fee that gets passed along to the customer, ever wonder why Verizon can give you virtually the same access as Covad at half the price, in the business market). Cable modem got around this it uses the Cable line thats been there for 20+ years now basically. They had to do some work on the backend, and on the poles to get Cable modem inplace, but it was almost seemless and required very little change in the last mile. DSL is all last mile. So this brings up the idea of volume. Draw your own conclusion here, but it seems to me that its alot easier for cable modem to scale up fast. DSL requires alot more changes to get up to that scale and costs alot more, all that cost has to be go someplace, the consumer. It doesn't have to though. Right now because DSL must pretty much be installed by the local Telco who if they are not your DSL provider are a competator with your DSL provider. This means higher costs all around. For install, for rackspace in the CO for DSlams, etc. How to fix this problem? The smae way the cable company did, they lay their own line(or at least contract for someone to do it), maintain their own facilities, and have their own backbone connections(more so with the Mediaone/AT&T merger, which BTW I think is a good thing, if they would take the cable modem networks to the next level, and offer enterprise level connections, which the technology is able to do, white papers on some of the cable modem models put them at 10 Symetric or higher) That leads to the other big problem for DSL not provided by the local telco(s) everyone around them competes with them. If they did the right thing and started building their own infrastructure, they would still have to buy bandwidth from somene who potentially competes with them either the DSL or Cable Modem market. How to solve this, take the backbone away from the big players, make it a common resource that all providers can get access to, for the same rates. And there you have it equal access for all, would make the maret flatten out, and then service would be king because everyone could fight fairly in the price war. DSL has way to many price barriers.
I am the domain contact for wickednews.net, and its service wickednews, an internet news service.(I administer the DNS for a small internet company) About two years ago, a jerk off lawyer from a company in CA, who will remain nameless because I don't want to get involved in anymore fights with him, called up looking for the owners of the domain and the company running the service. Which we would not give him of course, they are our customers and I have no obligation to give that info out. He decided to come after myself and the other partners in the hosting company. He was claiming that his company had a trademark on the word "wicked" and specically on wickednews. And yes indeed they do, it was pending at the time, and we theorize he was doing due dilegence to scare us into dropping it, to clear the way. We investigated the issue to see if we could fight back, or at least have a rational discusssion with him(he would not dicuss, only continued to say that we had to drop it because of the pending trademark) What we found was that they had filed the trademark a year after wickednews had gone into business, the web site that they claimed their trademark for ahd not come into existance until over a year after Wickednews.net had been in business. They didn't own any directly conflicting domain names at that time. There were at leat 20 other potentially conflicting sites out there. We drafted a very kind and stright forward letter to him sent it certified mail(NOTE: NO legal conversation is offical until you send certified mail, do not talk to them on the phone, or even return emails other than to say put it in writing, a little legal advice I had to pay a lawyer for I give all of you for free) telling him that we did not consider his claim valid and telling him explictly why we thought so. He went away, and has never been heard from again. I would say the same applies in the case above, SGI has no right to come after everyone on the net that has the work Open in their name its too, common...and has a specific context in its meaning that is not associated with any one company. IE. Do they intend to go after every company that claims to manufactur "OPEN"Systems, and OSes, thats a pretty big laundry list and I think some of them have even deeper pockets than SGI. They are tring to bully you and have no basis for their claim, ignore them and move on.
The govenment of the US and other countries world wide needs to stop this non-sense. The idea of patents WAS(a big was) to protect inventors and allow them to reap profit and recognition for their work. The intent being they would create a new work, and then owning the patent beable to sell that work to some company for mass production. The system has become very preverted from this intent. Now, every company in the world seems to think that they have the right to patent every little idea, and then apply it very(VERY) broadly to discourage competition, or even shut down competition. The most fustrating cases of this are companies that turn around and get patents recently, and then try to apply them to long standing (or common sense solution) tech. The one I loved most is BT claiming they had the hyperlinking patent(if anyone deserves it I think XEROX, had the first use on this concept in the 60's pretty much when they invented the mouse). At the very least the rules need to change so that a patent cannot be enforced retroactively, or against already existing projects. Additionally if you fail to enforce your patent for a certian amount of time, I say one year, after vilolating tech comes into existance you loose the right.(See the.gif mess, that happened a few years back of an example where they should never have been able to enforce it because they ignored it for so long). Additionally patents should be norrowly enforced/granted on very specific details, ideally against working tech "This is what I did, it works like this", not "I have an idea it would work like this". Similar problems demand similar answers, in biology there is a theory called co-vergent evolution, that states that if life arose in two different places(on Earth, or else where in the universe) under similar circumstances, and conditions, that the lifeforms would be very much similar. Ie. We have sharks here, if you went to another earth type world out there someplace, it would probably have creatures, that looked, acted, and behaved very much like sharks.(A.C. Clarke expalins this very well in his book 2061). The same is true, of software works, my boss could come to me tomorrow, and tell me that he needs a system to do X on the Web site I develop. It is quite possible that another company in our same business, could have already have been doing X, in a very similar way to my design to the solution. I'd never know until one or both of us tried to claim we though it up first, where really we were doing it at the same time. The problem is similar the solution is going to be similar, we didn't use each others works or ideas though.
Just my view.
Just an additional thought which everyone will hate, but if they had not been what they are would the shape of computers be what it is today? I think we needed that 800-pound Gorilla, to force some standards. Think about the current state of Linux, standards lack there no two people creating a Distro put the sdame things in the same places, or even install the same LIBs in the same places, so when I compile something its hit or miss sometimes.
I say NO.
Yes Microsoft is a bully, the 800-pounf gorilla, of the Computer Industry, but they just like everyother company need to be so. Seems to be that they have simplely achived the American dream, and are getting punished for it.
Have they done anything that anyone else didn't do. Seems to me Solaris has been shipping with Browser for a while too, Netscape infact. KDE, now has the browser built right into the interface in version 2.x, and even 1.x had a very IE like integration with the WEB.
I am not a M$ lover by any means(my web company is LINUX based) and I hate the way they do business personally, esspecially the new up coming stuff where it seems one is going to need to be web connected to even use the software since using will mean registering.
Just some thoughts.
Um I have to disagree with you there...I don't find MP3s at all objectionable. I am not interested in a flame war, I just disagree, I don't think the Napster concept is all that wrong.
This all just wrong. The net should be getting cheaper, and faster. Technology keeps moving forward able to move more data faster all the time. If the Telco's, ISP's, ETC would just take advantage of what they already have we would be in much better shape. 1. A 1.5 SDSL line should be standard equipment if your within the reach of the connection. 2. We hear all the time about all the dark fiber in the information corridor, light that fiber up. 3. Stop installing old outdated equipment, only install the stuff thats capable of providing the latest advances.
Ok, first off I will state that I run a Binaries only Usenet site. So if that troubles you just move on. Our site caters to the users who are looking for usenet binaries, and we filter everything else out(aka Spam, and text articles) and only present the pics, mp3's, fonts, etc. By the same token, we also offer usenet feeds tailored to the users need/desire. So if a user wants a binaries only feed, or a text only feed, we have that for them too.
To my point, I have watched however over the years as the USENET has become hopelessly clogged and choked as more and more useless Crap gets dumped into it. In many many groups the actual material vs SPAM ratio is in the neighborhood of 10% vs 90%. Even worse many of the groups have messages that just send the user to a web site that actually contains the content of the message when they read them. I really would love to find a way to take back usenet(other than strict moderation, because lets face it a great deal of USENET seems to exist in the alt.* area these days where moderation is somewhat verboten), so that the groups are once again filled with real information, and content rather than nude pictures in rec.humor.funny, because someone is trying to advertise his web site.
--Haplo
Newsmaster
www.wickednews.net
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the same situation most of my school life, I never fit in because I was in a schooldistrict where you looked and acted the same as everyone else or you didn't get accepted(this changed in High School by the way when i could choose my own classes, and then could choose to be with kids who were actually intelligent and wanted to learn, but in the lower 1-8 grades they seem to like to keep things mixed up, so you must become part of the lowest common denominator) Anyway, there are two ways to help the problem, both of which work pretty well: 1. Nearly every school has a Honors/gifted student program of some sort, convince the school he belongs there, and NOT with the lowest common demoninator. He will be with people of his own caliber, and perhaps even more interested in his school work. This can be hard if he is like I was, and bored with the work, and therefore only getting average grades(I didn't excel, until i was challenged I was just plain bnored and didn't care, i considered everything busy work, and yes Schools really do give more busy work to the lowest common denominator, I had a teacher as much as admit it once) He might excel, he might even fail but either way socially he will be better off. 2. This is the harder part you might agree with less. Teach him to fight, now hear me out. On almost a yearly basis someone would decide to push too far, but I Knew how to fight, although I avoided it. In the end I would stand up to them, and eventually this poor person having run out of words would try to talk with a fist instead. I never started a fight, but I always finished it, and in the end the tomenting would end for a while, usually the result of a couple black eyes, and once or twice a broken nose. usually this led to a 2-5 days suspension, but it was worth it. (Twice the administration of the school was so happy that someone had finally knocked the bully of the year down to size they didn't even suspend me, because of the other guys rep)
Humm, big surprise that this got posted by an AC. If your gonna post could ya please register.
Not that I eer saw, but he was wearing the typical dark glasses, so maybe that counts.
Another Sackless AC, actually I get paid to encode MP3's so there!
UGH, station has been going down hill for years. Well thats alright I never listened to their net stream much since they switched to Real audion and it sounded like I was stuck underwater. I told them they really should use shout/ice cast intead, but they avoided the issue. In any case my .02 the DJ's get paid to do their show, how the station broadcasts the show shouldn't matter.
Yes, I have infact and the people I worked with in everycase were very helpful. In onecase they offered their software for free, but did charge for support. Therefore the calls they got for support were actually worthwhile calls, things that were really broke, and not dumb stuff. The other was a vendor of a high scale app that carged a high fee for support, I also had to pay for the app, bt again because it was their main revenue stream to get paid for support they were very helpful.
Why didn't this make the front page? This seems like an issue all /.ers would be interested in.
Once the internet"Cyberstate" is recognized as what t s and we all can get represenation of our ideals in the real world maybe...until then, there is nothing you can do. 3 things need to happen. 1. A "standard" for internet signiture needs to exist, and it needs to be free for all, but back by a recognizable, non-corruptable source. PGP, is close, but to be usefully valid if needs a trusted key system that only the Veri$igns of the world can offer. We need a company to step up and offer key signing/checking for everyone for free(People, businesses, everyone) This will make the emailing of Congressmen. etc useful, right now they trash most of those emails, they can't verify they actually came from someone in their district. So generally the flood of email we generate is useless. 2. On the same point, congressmen need to start reading email, or even recognizing the medium entirely. 3. The hard one, our reps need to start voting te way we ask them to vote not how they thing they should vote. I recently participated in a campaign to get my local rep to vote a certain way on an issue(it was net related). He instead played party politics, and let the lobbiests pretty much buy his vote. I have often thought of running for a seat in local govenment and then using a web site to poll the people on how they want me to vote. We need to get back to for the people by the people which is not how American govenment works anymore. its more or less for the companies, by the lobbiests, and political parties.
Well actually yes!
Humm, last count, I saw there are more holes, and bugs in the "trusted" MS software than any other OS/Application out there.
Amen Brother!
Obviously you don't actually have the balls to face up to you opinions since you Posted as an AC. Next time at least have the presence of mind to face up to your opinion you sackless wonder. I might take it more seriously. And by the way its not an attitude that everything should be free, I am willing to pay for quality. But it turns out the best stuff is free, companies should make their money on the real commodity, support. And as far as MP3's musicians should make their money doing their job touring!
I give up on Microsoft operating systems to do any real work. I'll stick with Linux and ABCDE to record my Mp3s thank you, simple quick, quality and painless. Why can't MS just realize that the people who truely want to do these things(the whole world should realize this in general) will find a way to do it. No matter what imposed limits, or protection they try to impliment we will get around it. Its a geeks, right, and Mission to do so.
I had a Chemistry professor in college, who was blind(UMASS Amherst). If he could do chemistry expirements(and proctor exams, figure that one out, and he did catch people cheating on occasion), I gotta figure there are blind programmers, etc out there too! For this guy it was all a game of knowing what was where, I think. I fact a friend of mine once messed with him and swiched the oder of several containers on the lab table before a lecture. The professor, stopped for a second during the lecture, switched the containers back to the proper order, and simply commented "nice try".
There are several companies out there that will do the storage for you, for pennies on the dollar of what you are doing now. These places allow you to send the data to them via Internet, or even on you local lan, to medium in the data center. They store the data in EMC Symmetrix Boxes. Highly reliable, highly redundant configurations, with off site mirroring capablities. I have worked for a couple companies who did this. Very reliable, and generally inexpensive to use in the long run, and much easier to catalouge and manage especially when you need the data back.
I think it is possible. The real problem is its improbable. There are at least two factors making it impossible to get anywhere with the DSL market. 1. The real promise of DSL is high quality, high speed internet connections, always on, always available. Unfortunately those that are rolling out DSL are not living up to the promise, in the way's that people expect. I have had both DSL and Cable Modem in the past year, actually I still do...infact my company has both, for different purposes. In general people expect DSL to live up to the promised speeds, with the reliability we expect from the Phone company(Say what you will, but I can remember at least 100 times the power has gone out at my house but the phone is still working, NO ONE lives up to the kind of service except the phone company). DSL is not POTS though, but we are told its a phone type tech so we expect that level of service from it. More so since its a phone tech for getting on the internet we expect it to cost the same as that 56K dialup we have been using for years. The more informed DSL might even recognize the technology shift, and resultant price increase for what it is(I do anyway) and expect to pay more for this kind of access, BUT not what the DSL companies want to charge, COVAD charging $359 for 1.5 Symetric is just way out of line.(I would pay up to $100, and think most others would too, $100 a month is well within the typical geek budget, $359 is alittle insane) Now hold on let me give you the reason I think this so, before you fly of the Flame handle at me. I have one of these $359 line from Covad, but I also have a AT&T/Mediaone(Whoever they are this week) cable modem at the same site(remember they are for different reasons, if your truely interested in the details I can fill them in later) for $39.99 a month a get 1.5 down, and a variable speed up which varies between 300-1.1 according to my monitors. The DSL is the rock soild connectivity to the site, the Cable modem serves other purposes really just an administrative connection that doesn't effect the datasteam of my customers. So basically what I can deduce from all this is a question of volume, and/or administrative costing being the problem. A good look at this reveals how to fit the situation. Any DSL company is reliant on the TELco(s) in the area to get that line to the users house/business(A fee that gets passed along to the customer, ever wonder why Verizon can give you virtually the same access as Covad at half the price, in the business market). Cable modem got around this it uses the Cable line thats been there for 20+ years now basically. They had to do some work on the backend, and on the poles to get Cable modem inplace, but it was almost seemless and required very little change in the last mile. DSL is all last mile. So this brings up the idea of volume. Draw your own conclusion here, but it seems to me that its alot easier for cable modem to scale up fast. DSL requires alot more changes to get up to that scale and costs alot more, all that cost has to be go someplace, the consumer. It doesn't have to though. Right now because DSL must pretty much be installed by the local Telco who if they are not your DSL provider are a competator with your DSL provider. This means higher costs all around. For install, for rackspace in the CO for DSlams, etc. How to fix this problem? The smae way the cable company did, they lay their own line(or at least contract for someone to do it), maintain their own facilities, and have their own backbone connections(more so with the Mediaone/AT&T merger, which BTW I think is a good thing, if they would take the cable modem networks to the next level, and offer enterprise level connections, which the technology is able to do, white papers on some of the cable modem models put them at 10 Symetric or higher) That leads to the other big problem for DSL not provided by the local telco(s) everyone around them competes with them. If they did the right thing and started building their own infrastructure, they would still have to buy bandwidth from somene who potentially competes with them either the DSL or Cable Modem market. How to solve this, take the backbone away from the big players, make it a common resource that all providers can get access to, for the same rates. And there you have it equal access for all, would make the maret flatten out, and then service would be king because everyone could fight fairly in the price war. DSL has way to many price barriers.
I happen to own several corprate logos, and trademarks, ETC, and think both you and SGI are full of SHIT!
Load of Crap, there is no conflict. This like saying that anyone that uses the word slash in the domain name is conflicting with slashdot.org.
I am the domain contact for wickednews.net, and its service wickednews, an internet news service.(I administer the DNS for a small internet company) About two years ago, a jerk off lawyer from a company in CA, who will remain nameless because I don't want to get involved in anymore fights with him, called up looking for the owners of the domain and the company running the service. Which we would not give him of course, they are our customers and I have no obligation to give that info out. He decided to come after myself and the other partners in the hosting company. He was claiming that his company had a trademark on the word "wicked" and specically on wickednews. And yes indeed they do, it was pending at the time, and we theorize he was doing due dilegence to scare us into dropping it, to clear the way. We investigated the issue to see if we could fight back, or at least have a rational discusssion with him(he would not dicuss, only continued to say that we had to drop it because of the pending trademark) What we found was that they had filed the trademark a year after wickednews had gone into business, the web site that they claimed their trademark for ahd not come into existance until over a year after Wickednews.net had been in business. They didn't own any directly conflicting domain names at that time. There were at leat 20 other potentially conflicting sites out there. We drafted a very kind and stright forward letter to him sent it certified mail(NOTE: NO legal conversation is offical until you send certified mail, do not talk to them on the phone, or even return emails other than to say put it in writing, a little legal advice I had to pay a lawyer for I give all of you for free) telling him that we did not consider his claim valid and telling him explictly why we thought so. He went away, and has never been heard from again. I would say the same applies in the case above, SGI has no right to come after everyone on the net that has the work Open in their name its too, common...and has a specific context in its meaning that is not associated with any one company. IE. Do they intend to go after every company that claims to manufactur "OPEN"Systems, and OSes, thats a pretty big laundry list and I think some of them have even deeper pockets than SGI. They are tring to bully you and have no basis for their claim, ignore them and move on.
The govenment of the US and other countries world wide needs to stop this non-sense. The idea of patents WAS(a big was) to protect inventors and allow them to reap profit and recognition for their work. The intent being they would create a new work, and then owning the patent beable to sell that work to some company for mass production. The system has become very preverted from this intent. Now, every company in the world seems to think that they have the right to patent every little idea, and then apply it very(VERY) broadly to discourage competition, or even shut down competition. The most fustrating cases of this are companies that turn around and get patents recently, and then try to apply them to long standing (or common sense solution) tech. The one I loved most is BT claiming they had the hyperlinking patent(if anyone deserves it I think XEROX, had the first use on this concept in the 60's pretty much when they invented the mouse). At the very least the rules need to change so that a patent cannot be enforced retroactively, or against already existing projects. Additionally if you fail to enforce your patent for a certian amount of time, I say one year, after vilolating tech comes into existance you loose the right.(See the .gif mess, that happened a few years back of an example where they should never have been able to enforce it because they ignored it for so long). Additionally patents should be norrowly enforced/granted on very specific details, ideally against working tech "This is what I did, it works like this", not "I have an idea it would work like this". Similar problems demand similar answers, in biology there is a theory called co-vergent evolution, that states that if life arose in two different places(on Earth, or else where in the universe) under similar circumstances, and conditions, that the lifeforms would be very much similar. Ie. We have sharks here, if you went to another earth type world out there someplace, it would probably have creatures, that looked, acted, and behaved very much like sharks.(A.C. Clarke expalins this very well in his book 2061). The same is true, of software works, my boss could come to me tomorrow, and tell me that he needs a system to do X on the Web site I develop. It is quite possible that another company in our same business, could have already have been doing X, in a very similar way to my design to the solution. I'd never know until one or both of us tried to claim we though it up first, where really we were doing it at the same time. The problem is similar the solution is going to be similar, we didn't use each others works or ideas though.
Just my view.
Just an additional thought which everyone will hate, but if they had not been what they are would the shape of computers be what it is today? I think we needed that 800-pound Gorilla, to force some standards. Think about the current state of Linux, standards lack there no two people creating a Distro put the sdame things in the same places, or even install the same LIBs in the same places, so when I compile something its hit or miss sometimes.
I say NO. Yes Microsoft is a bully, the 800-pounf gorilla, of the Computer Industry, but they just like everyother company need to be so. Seems to be that they have simplely achived the American dream, and are getting punished for it. Have they done anything that anyone else didn't do. Seems to me Solaris has been shipping with Browser for a while too, Netscape infact. KDE, now has the browser built right into the interface in version 2.x, and even 1.x had a very IE like integration with the WEB. I am not a M$ lover by any means(my web company is LINUX based) and I hate the way they do business personally, esspecially the new up coming stuff where it seems one is going to need to be web connected to even use the software since using will mean registering. Just some thoughts.
Um I have to disagree with you there...I don't find MP3s at all objectionable. I am not interested in a flame war, I just disagree, I don't think the Napster concept is all that wrong.
This all just wrong. The net should be getting cheaper, and faster. Technology keeps moving forward able to move more data faster all the time. If the Telco's, ISP's, ETC would just take advantage of what they already have we would be in much better shape. 1. A 1.5 SDSL line should be standard equipment if your within the reach of the connection. 2. We hear all the time about all the dark fiber in the information corridor, light that fiber up. 3. Stop installing old outdated equipment, only install the stuff thats capable of providing the latest advances.
Ok, first off I will state that I run a Binaries only Usenet site. So if that troubles you just move on. Our site caters to the users who are looking for usenet binaries, and we filter everything else out(aka Spam, and text articles) and only present the pics, mp3's, fonts, etc. By the same token, we also offer usenet feeds tailored to the users need/desire. So if a user wants a binaries only feed, or a text only feed, we have that for them too. To my point, I have watched however over the years as the USENET has become hopelessly clogged and choked as more and more useless Crap gets dumped into it. In many many groups the actual material vs SPAM ratio is in the neighborhood of 10% vs 90%. Even worse many of the groups have messages that just send the user to a web site that actually contains the content of the message when they read them. I really would love to find a way to take back usenet(other than strict moderation, because lets face it a great deal of USENET seems to exist in the alt.* area these days where moderation is somewhat verboten), so that the groups are once again filled with real information, and content rather than nude pictures in rec.humor.funny, because someone is trying to advertise his web site. --Haplo Newsmaster www.wickednews.net