Well, what would you do if you ran a free site that didn't make money? Unless people are willing to pay for "The Washington Post Premium" that includes all of the freelancers' work, I don't see an alternative.
Whether or not this decision was right, it's NOT good news for web users.
Does this mean that a poster to Slashdot could later demand that it be deleted? This could be bad for community sites, or in fact any that depend on submissions by others.
And the carriers with their heads screwed on planned for it, and in fact offer dark fiber as a service to ISPs and others who need it. The ones who fucked up were the ones who believed the numbers about wildly escalating traffic and assumed that this growth curve would never flatten out.
Remember that just a few years ago there was a backbone capacity shortage. ISPs were competing to get their networks to OC12, OC48, and then OC192 - in part to have bragging rights, but mostly to keep up with growing demand. So it made complete sense that a huge amount of fiber would be laid, and anyone with reasonable Excel skills could (and did) predict that some of it would be used right away, and some would be used later.
The comparison with the RR's is valid in part and invalid in part. It's like the railroads in that it cost a lot to lay conduit/fiber, and that investors made incorrect guesses about demand growth. However, it is very different from the railroads in that there's really no incentive to abandon a strand of fiber. Railroads take up land that can be sold to other users. Fiber strands have very low maintenance costs, so owners can just sit on them for years if necessary . Which the smart ones will.
As for the fiber owned by carriers who might go bankrupt, I would love to be a bottom-feeder like IDT right now. There are good assets out there that can be bought way cheap.
I use Yahoo Groups all the time - they're great, better than eGroups were (a few nice features). The search is still fairly useful, and if you don't find it in the directory, it sends you to Google. Their mail service is the best free webmail around (very useful for accessing POP3 behind a firewall or at a public web terminal). My Yahoo still gives me useful news du jour. What's not to like?
I'd call it really fucking stupid, and I work for an ISP! Only free mail providers like Yahoo would use this.. and they already do, so in that way it isn't news. If my emails suddenly got ads attached, I'd switch ISPs the very same hour.
"We're empowering content owners with our unique and advanced digital content infrastructure and services, designed to facilitate the conversion, storage, management, promotion and delivery of intellectual capital and digital content."
I'm not complaining about not using Linux - I use Windows happily! - but I have found that Exchange and Outlook are very unreliable, prone to crashing, etc., even though they're "easy to administer." That's why I criticized the choice of Exchange...
I agree that polling zealots will get you less useful results - regardless of which product they're zealous for.
IDC conducts research which will help its subscribers make better business decisions. This often means surveying
decision-makers who make the purchasing decision rather than the people who actually use the products. This also
tends to mean that academically interesting, but not commercially viable, research may not be done at all.
To summarize: they make recommendations to the purchasers based on comments received from the purchasers, without regard to what the users think!
NC sucked balls and I'm glad it lost. The specter of losing all control of your PC to Larry Ellison's Oracle empire was perceivd as, if you can believe it, worse than Microsoft to the user base, and so it died. Good riddance.
Right. Petreley wildly overstates the support for.NET. My impression was that people don't yet know they don't want it - because they don't yet realize that it's another one of these godawful-stupid centralized data storage ideas.
Hey everyone in the biz: People like their PCs! They like controlling their own data and apps. If Hailstorm/.NET try to remove this control from the users, they will have the same level of success as, say, Microsoft Bob.
Convergence of (TV and everything else) makes very little sense! I don't want my CABLE OPERATOR to have control over anything else in my home, even if it does mean I can't watch Star Wars on my alarm clock.
Gates wants proprietary software to be closed up tight so that
he controls it all and he wants open-source software to be purely public domain so that he can steal it at will.
Seriously. I think this summarizes the situation perfectly! It's like divorce court: what's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine.
GPL prevents such behavior, which is why MS is so eager to fight it. Fuck 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not this decision was right, it's NOT good news for web users.
Does this mean that a poster to Slashdot could later demand that it be deleted? This could be bad for community sites, or in fact any that depend on submissions by others.
Remember that just a few years ago there was a backbone capacity shortage. ISPs were competing to get their networks to OC12, OC48, and then OC192 - in part to have bragging rights, but mostly to keep up with growing demand. So it made complete sense that a huge amount of fiber would be laid, and anyone with reasonable Excel skills could (and did) predict that some of it would be used right away, and some would be used later.
The comparison with the RR's is valid in part and invalid in part. It's like the railroads in that it cost a lot to lay conduit/fiber, and that investors made incorrect guesses about demand growth. However, it is very different from the railroads in that there's really no incentive to abandon a strand of fiber. Railroads take up land that can be sold to other users. Fiber strands have very low maintenance costs, so owners can just sit on them for years if necessary . Which the smart ones will.
As for the fiber owned by carriers who might go bankrupt, I would love to be a bottom-feeder like IDT right now. There are good assets out there that can be bought way cheap.
True. But unless there's a way to make good money staying private, what else can they do?
I use Yahoo Groups all the time - they're great, better than eGroups were (a few nice features). The search is still fairly useful, and if you don't find it in the directory, it sends you to Google. Their mail service is the best free webmail around (very useful for accessing POP3 behind a firewall or at a public web terminal). My Yahoo still gives me useful news du jour. What's not to like?
we already do
I'd call it really fucking stupid, and I work for an ISP! Only free mail providers like Yahoo would use this .. and they already do, so in that way it isn't news. If my emails suddenly got ads attached, I'd switch ISPs the very same hour.
that's excellent. someone needs to h4x0r the microsoft site and change all the EULA pointers to point here instead!
Astronomers might have to wait awhile for more clues in the search for life. The earliest another mission could launch for the Jupiter system is 2008.
Anyone know why? Just budget?
Or just add it to your web templates .... I'm sure it wouldn't take more than a few days to add it to Slash for example.
server capacity. Let the users who really want to exchange Divx's go to a pay service.
in other words: it's copy protected.
I was trying to get some work done, and then you sent me to that Apple I page ...
loved the Bonnie Tyler reference!
I agree that polling zealots will get you less useful results - regardless of which product they're zealous for.
IDC conducts research which will help its subscribers make better business decisions. This often means surveying decision-makers who make the purchasing decision rather than the people who actually use the products. This also tends to mean that academically interesting, but not commercially viable, research may not be done at all.
To summarize: they make recommendations to the purchasers based on comments received from the purchasers, without regard to what the users think!
Now I know why I have to use Exchange.
There will be a $4 billion market in bullshit analysis by 2006.
NC sucked balls and I'm glad it lost. The specter of losing all control of your PC to Larry Ellison's Oracle empire was perceivd as, if you can believe it, worse than Microsoft to the user base, and so it died. Good riddance.
Hey everyone in the biz: People like their PCs! They like controlling their own data and apps. If Hailstorm/.NET try to remove this control from the users, they will have the same level of success as, say, Microsoft Bob.
I'm sure Microsoft will throw a fit over not being able to repackage it as MS Mapper and charge $200...
Seriously. Everyone wants this to be something other than a PC, but I agree that they will all fail...
Convergence of (TV and everything else) makes very little sense! I don't want my CABLE OPERATOR to have control over anything else in my home, even if it does mean I can't watch Star Wars on my alarm clock.
Seriously. I think this summarizes the situation perfectly! It's like divorce court: what's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine.
GPL prevents such behavior, which is why MS is so eager to fight it. Fuck 'em.
That said, part of /. is making fun of Taco, Hemos, et al., so you really can't blame the /bots for taking this fairly grand opportunity to do so.
damn i wish i had mod points for this one...