That's because people who drink water don't make money for the people who are paying for scientific studies in the first place: the coffee, wine/beer and milk producers.
I'll tell the world sucking dick will make you live longer, if they pay me enough.
Why don't they just look for good ideas, then redo the commercial professionally based on the user-submitted idea ? Give the winner a little cameo or something. That'd be worth good brownie points.
If I read the article right, this is basically VMware (or Bochs) with a different name. How is that going to change the world again ? Don't most distributions already offer binary packages in the first place ? Just because I run Gentoo doesn't mean my mother has to.
For all I care, it'd be nice if we could cull the hundreds of vanity distros and repatriate all those developers onto Ubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo, Debian and maybe Slackware (if they even care). Heck we could probably merge all the binary distros into a single one with "profiles", because typically a binary that runs on one standard distro, will run just as well on another distro running on the same architecture (as long as its dependencies are met). In a pinch, I can build something on my Gentoo, copy it over to my pain-in-the-ass CentOS box and run it. x86 is x86 no matter what crap you load onto it, it still runs x86 code.
Well now I'm willing to grant IBM the benefit of the doubt, but there's a big difference between IBM trademarking something they may or may not release, and some snarky asian dude earning several livings by artificially inflating the price of a virtual commodity. Real estate gains value over time because of two things: 1. inflation and 2. dumb people can't stop having babies, thus demand keeps going up. The price of real estate is directly coupled to how much a potential buyer is willing to pay.
The price of a parked domain is only related to how greedy the squatter chooses to be. If his 2 year fishing expedition produces no suckers, he lets the domain lapse and its price snaps back to $8.99 instantly, for anyone interested in buying. The value of a plot of land or a home is still worth the same (excluding dramatic changes in the neighborhood), whether the realtor pushes it or not, as long as it's up for sale.
I've heard of this before. I don't know where you do your searches but it happens a lot. You wait a week after checking availability and find some reseller bought your domain. All I can think of is either the site doing your searches keeps logs and sells them to a squatter, or spyware is watching your domain activity, though that seems like a waste of a bot;) What's worse is the more visits a hoarded domain gets, the more likely its owner will renew it. Either it's making money by pimping ads, or the squatter hopes you'll cave in and pay the inflated price.
I completely side-step this by doing my own availability checks. I just cobbled a quick PHP form that executes "whois" and pipes the output back into HTML. Only once I've made my decision do I ever visit a registrar's site.
It's more the fact that in this crowded web, the quality and "ring" of a domain name has a direct impact on the traffic you'll get. If your domain is "www.MyNewMyspaceKillerWithALongDomainName.com" instead of "www.talksoup.com", chances are the short name will win. Why ? Because it's easy to remember and share. What if you're having lunch with some friends and you want to tell them about your site, do you think they're going to remember the long one at all ? But everyone will remember a short catchy name like Talk Soup and will be able to type it from memory when they get to their PC, THEN they can bookmark it.
Or what if one of your regulars wants to tell his mother about it over the phone ? He's not going to spell a 20-letter name over a long distance call to his deaf mother who can't type.
We live in a world full of non-geeks and complete idiots, and of course foreigners whose grasp of english spelling might not always be as good as yours and mine, but we still want their eyeballs (and money). In fact, a significant aspect of domain registration is trying to think of common misspellings and registering them all (before some fraudster does). This way you're providing your users with a kind of auto-spell-check. Hello? Whitehouse.com ? I rest my case.
I guess the point of my little "stories" is that all these companies run by faceless minimum-wage kids are full of holes. After all, by honoring the crazy prices, these employees are just doing their tightly-defined thankless jobs. You can't expect them to give a damn about the company's bottom line when the top seller can't even afford most of the things he sells with his $500/week income. I will even go as far as saying that in the 2-man operation I described above, well there were much more than 2 people benefitting from the stunt and at least one of them was an employee at one of the stores they were duping. The staff discounts were puny (like 10% off on 200% markup items), so he chose to defraud his own employer.
In a greedy world where business owners get ripped off by their own family members, how can you possibly expect a huge retail chain to have any sort of control over what happens in its hundreds of stores ? I certainly don't expect a sales person to check the browser settings for proxies every time they run a price check, and it's not like the company is going to implement any sort of security policy unless the problem becomes known. I also don't expect a customer service rep to tell the difference between a real store and a fake one designed to abuse their price matching policy. It's not like they're going to drive to the address and physically verify its existence while the customer waits at the counter.
These weaknesses can't be solved with a quick fix, they are the product of fundamental flaws in the business model and implementation. We're seeing a surge of smaller shops that offer much better prices than the big guys, which means lower markups but they make it up with high volume. They don't need a price matching policy because they know they have the lowest prices. They don't need to underpay their staff because they're paid a decent hourly wage with or without commission, and they can certainly afford to let their staff buy things at cost because it helps with their buying power.
That does seem like a problem. Here in Canada the fuel tax is much much higher, since we work in litres, not gallons, and we have two fuel taxes: provincial and federal. Then of course we tack on the ubiquitous sales taxes so in the end, about 1/3rd of the pump price goes to our sloppy government. The provincials usually spend it all on hookers and booze, but the federal budgets take care of our roads to a certain extent. Most of the road problems are the result of inadequate man power, because you know you need eight guys for each shovel.
Maybe I'm being a cynical bastard again, but that article is REEEALLY light on content. Compared to the other featured articles from IBM, which are usually very rich and informative, this one is more like an "idiots guide to apache", the kind that belongs on Digg's mountain of filth. This is little more than a rehash of the Readme files for Apache and PHP combined. It's about as deep as telling a windows user how to make their PC faster by changing to the Windows NT theme.
Of much greater value to web professionals is this article from a fellow OSDN site (!)
Lighttpd can lighten Apache's load
how does accepting public funds taint an organization?
Under a fair, uncorrupted government, accepting public funds could be treated like funding from any other entity. For private businesses it would be a loan much like one from a bank. When you mortgage your house, the bank is the effective holder of the property until you pay it off. Same thing should apply to loan-funded businesses.
For publicly traded companies, the public funds should be seen as a purchase of stock, ideally with a few harsh conditions to limit stock fraud. Under no circumstances should such an investment result in the government having a controlling stake in the company, as not only does that imply horrible financial performance, but it also creates a conflict of interest as private shareholders would essentially be riding a public venture.
Either way, in the case of New Jersey and other cheapass states, you should just get rid of toll roads entirely. Drivers are already taxed halfway to hell on fuel, why should you pay again for toll roads ? Many countries even have laws explicitly forbidding tolls for passage.
I once heard a story about an obnoxious hacker who had set up a web proxy on his personal server, that could alter certain numbers on a web page on-the-fly, or even replace it with a locally-stored version. He went to the store, configured the kiosks to use his proxy then bought himself a nice LCD monitor at a very special price. After his shopping spree was over, he returned to the store one last time, to reset the kiosks to their standard settings.
I once heard another story about a duo of hackers who had set up a fake business. They used a pay-as-you-go phone as their contact number, and a professional-looking e-commerce site. Whenever one of the guys needed to buy some electronic gadget or computer part, they'd post a crazy low sales price on their site, print the page and take it to their favorite big-box store. When customer service called the fictitious store to confirm the sale price and availability, the other guy would answer the phone. According to legend, they successfully employed this ruse for about two years until one day they were both enjoying their fancy toys when the phone rang. It was one of the employees at the big store, he was so impressed with the deals that he wanted to come to the invisible store and buy the amazing 70" plasma TV that was "on special". They gave some other dealer's address and quickly destroyed all traces of their existence, out of fear of this savvy shopper finding out about their scam.
Man, don't I ever wish I had thought of that. Now pardon me while I call my acc^H^H^Hfriend for a price check.
I have a better idea: Let's kick China off the net and reap their IP blocks, since they don't want our rampant free-thinking to infect their people anyway, and I certainly have never seen anything good come from those IP ranges. Then we can go after other bad neighbors. Sometimes when you run out of space (be it online or IRL), you don't have to go buy more space, you just have to do some cleaning and sorting.
IANAL (nor do I care), but "software patents" weren't accepted by the USPTO until 1981. A lot of the stuff Microsoft (and Apple) ripped off was from the late 70's, open season for IP theft back then.
Seems to me like this magazine finally blew it's (already weak) cover. It's one thing to have advertising on every other page of a magazine, it's another when the rest of the book is all payola.
I stopped reading computer magazines a long time ago, right around the time we went from 20 mags to 200, right around the time mags started having product names in their TITLE, right around the time that all the good advertisers moved elsewhere and let the scammers fill the pages with their counterfeit system-on-a-chip-made-in-china rackets.
The only paper mag I don't knock is DDJ, and even then I thought they were running a bit dry as of late with all the regurgitated Java bullshit. Magazines have become largely obsolete, replaced by top-shelf blogs.
Sad but true. On a tech floor with about 400 guys and 5-6 women (of which 4 were dropped at birth or something), all you see is a bunch of eyes peeking over the cubicles, and all you hear is "Please hold for a moment" followed by "Dude I'd hit that!"
I may be anti-social but I've seen enough por^H^H^Hwomen in my life that I don't drool over female coworkers. Not since I stopped working in a strip club:)
Stop fucking around and do it right the first time.
How hard is that?
In the 21st century, apparently that is so hard it is utterly impossible. We live in a world where nothing is ever "right". Well I can tell you one thing: The driver teams probably did get things "right" the first time, in the sense that they probably cooked up drivers that adhered to published specs, and made good use of the hardware available. Now it's perfectly normal to have small updates from time to time to incorporate refinements in the performance or stability of the software, but in an ideal world, once it's 100% compliant it should be finished.
In the real world, there are hundreds of thousands of developers outside the company, and a lot of them are complete idiots who can't code to spec half the time. Surely you've heard the remark "If it compiles, SHIP IT!"... that attitude is the modus operandi of quite a few coders, who are only marginally more efficient than a million monkeys with typewriters, banging random crap until the output is close enough to the desired result. These people write sloppy, inefficient code; they misread and misunderstand published specs and guides; they make your bleeding-edge video card look worse than the software renderer. These imbeciles are the reason NVidia and ATI need to release "optimized" drivers. In essence, they're fixing other people's mistakes. It's like that fat bald bastard in the LeBaron who can't be bothered to use his turn signals, prompting Chrysler to add a webcam , sophisticated image-processing A.I. and telepathic circuitry to automatically switch on the flicker when lardass is thinking of turning, rather than expecting him to correct his bad ways.
Maybe I'm just a comical psychopath, but every time I hear of Jack Thompson and how he's going to sue all the violence out of this world, I get this recurring daydream of a cheap-suit-wearing scumbag attorney getting blown away by a bunch of satanic chanting school kids armed with 1920's style barrel-loading automatics. Then I get this other daydream where he gets viciously pounded to a bloody mush by a strap-on wielding statuesque porn star Gianna Michaels.
And then I take my meds and it all fades away. No, seriously, this guy's a big old hypocrite. He was born as a result of his folks making whoopy, and he lives in the USA because his ancestors fought independence wars for their freedom. Just because a bunch of looney teenagers go around shooting their classmates up, doesn't mean he can prance around like he's an angel of litigious mercy. I say make a snuff film featuring tommy boy.
Domain names are not real estate. God I'm sick of that flawed analogy.
Domain names online are more like registered trademarks in real life. The difference being that you can't defend a trademark against a newcomer if all you've done with it is sit on it like an egg, which is what these "domainers" do.
I'm in the business of web business, and there is nothing that irritates me more than having an "AHA" moment, and finding out my great fun domain name is already taken by a squatter. They bring NOTHING to the table, and they're stopping me from doing something actually useful with the name rather than throw up a sleazy parking page with its own ad search engine.
I've often negotiated domain names away from their owners, mostly because they were normal people who simply bought a cool domain and lost interest. I've never paid the astronomical prices these squatters try to extort, the most I've paid for a name was $100 and that way mostly because the guy had registered it for 7 years, 2 years in he still just had the registrar's parking page on there. He was happy to recover his investment plus enough for a case of beer, and I was happy to get the name I wanted for a friend's blog.
Hey here's an idea: domain hoarding is like a patent holding company. They cheaply appropriate low-value virtual properties, sit on them forever until some enterprising young fellow with a bright idea comes along, and then pounce on him when the money's good. Now there's a fitting analogy, and we all hate IP warehouses now don't we ?
I'm still waiting for the day we can partition PCs like mainframes, each slice running an independent OS yet sharing all the hardware. Something like VMware ESX, but for the mainstream. Linux on one half, Windows on the other, and the ability to switch between the two at will (or route them to dedicated monitors and input devices). As a software developer, I have three options:
1. Run one main OS, and encapsulate the other in VMware with reduced performance. 2. Run two separate PCs, which means double the cost, double the space, and double the cabling. 3. Dual boot one machine and hope no one's there to point and laugh
Right now I use #2, but it's a pain in the butt. The systems are never pegged and I really just have more hardware than I need. If I could condense the two into one beefy rig and dynamically assign processors/memory to each one as needed, it would not only save me money, but it would make it much easier to maintain as I only have one set of hardware to support rather than 2-3. One power supply, one RAID controller, one chassis to cool.
Oh you have it wrong, sir. These people aren't giving anything back to society. The DVD burning scum I speak of are the bums who pad their social assistance checks by selling movies at $5.00 a pop. They can't be bothered to hold a job, nor speak the language, nor take a bath for that matter, but they can make one hell of a business selling downloaded Telesyncs on a 20-cent el-cheapo blank disc.
Worse yet are the fools who buy the copies and knowingly supporting these bottom-feeders. If you're going to pirate the damned thing, just download it yourself for fuck's sake.
The attacks on civil rights should not be judged based on the events of 9/11. What the government has done, and is continuing to do, should not be tolerated under any circumstances. You shouldn't define your morals based on what the government tells you, that's completely backwards. The government should define their activities based on what their constituents tell the government.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because people who drink water don't make money for the people who are paying for scientific studies in the first place: the coffee, wine/beer and milk producers.
I'll tell the world sucking dick will make you live longer, if they pay me enough.
Why don't they just look for good ideas, then redo the commercial professionally based on the user-submitted idea ? Give the winner a little cameo or something. That'd be worth good brownie points.
If I read the article right, this is basically VMware (or Bochs) with a different name. How is that going to change the world again ? Don't most distributions already offer binary packages in the first place ? Just because I run Gentoo doesn't mean my mother has to.
For all I care, it'd be nice if we could cull the hundreds of vanity distros and repatriate all those developers onto Ubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo, Debian and maybe Slackware (if they even care). Heck we could probably merge all the binary distros into a single one with "profiles", because typically a binary that runs on one standard distro, will run just as well on another distro running on the same architecture (as long as its dependencies are met). In a pinch, I can build something on my Gentoo, copy it over to my pain-in-the-ass CentOS box and run it. x86 is x86 no matter what crap you load onto it, it still runs x86 code.
Well now I'm willing to grant IBM the benefit of the doubt, but there's a big difference between IBM trademarking something they may or may not release, and some snarky asian dude earning several livings by artificially inflating the price of a virtual commodity. Real estate gains value over time because of two things: 1. inflation and 2. dumb people can't stop having babies, thus demand keeps going up. The price of real estate is directly coupled to how much a potential buyer is willing to pay.
The price of a parked domain is only related to how greedy the squatter chooses to be. If his 2 year fishing expedition produces no suckers, he lets the domain lapse and its price snaps back to $8.99 instantly, for anyone interested in buying. The value of a plot of land or a home is still worth the same (excluding dramatic changes in the neighborhood), whether the realtor pushes it or not, as long as it's up for sale.
I've heard of this before. I don't know where you do your searches but it happens a lot. You wait a week after checking availability and find some reseller bought your domain. All I can think of is either the site doing your searches keeps logs and sells them to a squatter, or spyware is watching your domain activity, though that seems like a waste of a bot ;) What's worse is the more visits a hoarded domain gets, the more likely its owner will renew it. Either it's making money by pimping ads, or the squatter hopes you'll cave in and pay the inflated price.
I completely side-step this by doing my own availability checks. I just cobbled a quick PHP form that executes "whois" and pipes the output back into HTML. Only once I've made my decision do I ever visit a registrar's site.
It's more the fact that in this crowded web, the quality and "ring" of a domain name has a direct impact on the traffic you'll get. If your domain is "www.MyNewMyspaceKillerWithALongDomainName.com" instead of "www.talksoup.com", chances are the short name will win. Why ? Because it's easy to remember and share. What if you're having lunch with some friends and you want to tell them about your site, do you think they're going to remember the long one at all ? But everyone will remember a short catchy name like Talk Soup and will be able to type it from memory when they get to their PC, THEN they can bookmark it.
Or what if one of your regulars wants to tell his mother about it over the phone ? He's not going to spell a 20-letter name over a long distance call to his deaf mother who can't type.
We live in a world full of non-geeks and complete idiots, and of course foreigners whose grasp of english spelling might not always be as good as yours and mine, but we still want their eyeballs (and money). In fact, a significant aspect of domain registration is trying to think of common misspellings and registering them all (before some fraudster does). This way you're providing your users with a kind of auto-spell-check. Hello? Whitehouse.com ? I rest my case.
Yeah I guess Pizza and Beer Fridays don't fly so well with the fairer sex.
I guess the point of my little "stories" is that all these companies run by faceless minimum-wage kids are full of holes. After all, by honoring the crazy prices, these employees are just doing their tightly-defined thankless jobs. You can't expect them to give a damn about the company's bottom line when the top seller can't even afford most of the things he sells with his $500/week income. I will even go as far as saying that in the 2-man operation I described above, well there were much more than 2 people benefitting from the stunt and at least one of them was an employee at one of the stores they were duping. The staff discounts were puny (like 10% off on 200% markup items), so he chose to defraud his own employer.
In a greedy world where business owners get ripped off by their own family members, how can you possibly expect a huge retail chain to have any sort of control over what happens in its hundreds of stores ? I certainly don't expect a sales person to check the browser settings for proxies every time they run a price check, and it's not like the company is going to implement any sort of security policy unless the problem becomes known. I also don't expect a customer service rep to tell the difference between a real store and a fake one designed to abuse their price matching policy. It's not like they're going to drive to the address and physically verify its existence while the customer waits at the counter.
These weaknesses can't be solved with a quick fix, they are the product of fundamental flaws in the business model and implementation. We're seeing a surge of smaller shops that offer much better prices than the big guys, which means lower markups but they make it up with high volume. They don't need a price matching policy because they know they have the lowest prices. They don't need to underpay their staff because they're paid a decent hourly wage with or without commission, and they can certainly afford to let their staff buy things at cost because it helps with their buying power.
That does seem like a problem. Here in Canada the fuel tax is much much higher, since we work in litres, not gallons, and we have two fuel taxes: provincial and federal. Then of course we tack on the ubiquitous sales taxes so in the end, about 1/3rd of the pump price goes to our sloppy government. The provincials usually spend it all on hookers and booze, but the federal budgets take care of our roads to a certain extent. Most of the road problems are the result of inadequate man power, because you know you need eight guys for each shovel.
Maybe I'm being a cynical bastard again, but that article is REEEALLY light on content. Compared to the other featured articles from IBM, which are usually very rich and informative, this one is more like an "idiots guide to apache", the kind that belongs on Digg's mountain of filth. This is little more than a rehash of the Readme files for Apache and PHP combined. It's about as deep as telling a windows user how to make their PC faster by changing to the Windows NT theme. Of much greater value to web professionals is this article from a fellow OSDN site (!) Lighttpd can lighten Apache's load
Under a fair, uncorrupted government, accepting public funds could be treated like funding from any other entity. For private businesses it would be a loan much like one from a bank. When you mortgage your house, the bank is the effective holder of the property until you pay it off. Same thing should apply to loan-funded businesses.
For publicly traded companies, the public funds should be seen as a purchase of stock, ideally with a few harsh conditions to limit stock fraud. Under no circumstances should such an investment result in the government having a controlling stake in the company, as not only does that imply horrible financial performance, but it also creates a conflict of interest as private shareholders would essentially be riding a public venture.
Either way, in the case of New Jersey and other cheapass states, you should just get rid of toll roads entirely. Drivers are already taxed halfway to hell on fuel, why should you pay again for toll roads ? Many countries even have laws explicitly forbidding tolls for passage.
I love you! /Canadian
I once heard a story about an obnoxious hacker who had set up a web proxy on his personal server, that could alter certain numbers on a web page on-the-fly, or even replace it with a locally-stored version. He went to the store, configured the kiosks to use his proxy then bought himself a nice LCD monitor at a very special price. After his shopping spree was over, he returned to the store one last time, to reset the kiosks to their standard settings.
I once heard another story about a duo of hackers who had set up a fake business. They used a pay-as-you-go phone as their contact number, and a professional-looking e-commerce site. Whenever one of the guys needed to buy some electronic gadget or computer part, they'd post a crazy low sales price on their site, print the page and take it to their favorite big-box store. When customer service called the fictitious store to confirm the sale price and availability, the other guy would answer the phone. According to legend, they successfully employed this ruse for about two years until one day they were both enjoying their fancy toys when the phone rang. It was one of the employees at the big store, he was so impressed with the deals that he wanted to come to the invisible store and buy the amazing 70" plasma TV that was "on special". They gave some other dealer's address and quickly destroyed all traces of their existence, out of fear of this savvy shopper finding out about their scam.
Man, don't I ever wish I had thought of that. Now pardon me while I call my acc^H^H^Hfriend for a price check.
I have a better idea: Let's kick China off the net and reap their IP blocks, since they don't want our rampant free-thinking to infect their people anyway, and I certainly have never seen anything good come from those IP ranges. Then we can go after other bad neighbors. Sometimes when you run out of space (be it online or IRL), you don't have to go buy more space, you just have to do some cleaning and sorting.
IANAL (nor do I care), but "software patents" weren't accepted by the USPTO until 1981. A lot of the stuff Microsoft (and Apple) ripped off was from the late 70's, open season for IP theft back then.
Seems to me like this magazine finally blew it's (already weak) cover. It's one thing to have advertising on every other page of a magazine, it's another when the rest of the book is all payola.
I stopped reading computer magazines a long time ago, right around the time we went from 20 mags to 200, right around the time mags started having product names in their TITLE, right around the time that all the good advertisers moved elsewhere and let the scammers fill the pages with their counterfeit system-on-a-chip-made-in-china rackets.
The only paper mag I don't knock is DDJ, and even then I thought they were running a bit dry as of late with all the regurgitated Java bullshit. Magazines have become largely obsolete, replaced by top-shelf blogs.
Sad but true. On a tech floor with about 400 guys and 5-6 women (of which 4 were dropped at birth or something), all you see is a bunch of eyes peeking over the cubicles, and all you hear is "Please hold for a moment" followed by "Dude I'd hit that!"
:)
I may be anti-social but I've seen enough por^H^H^Hwomen in my life that I don't drool over female coworkers. Not since I stopped working in a strip club
In the 21st century, apparently that is so hard it is utterly impossible. We live in a world where nothing is ever "right". Well I can tell you one thing: The driver teams probably did get things "right" the first time, in the sense that they probably cooked up drivers that adhered to published specs, and made good use of the hardware available. Now it's perfectly normal to have small updates from time to time to incorporate refinements in the performance or stability of the software, but in an ideal world, once it's 100% compliant it should be finished.
In the real world, there are hundreds of thousands of developers outside the company, and a lot of them are complete idiots who can't code to spec half the time. Surely you've heard the remark "If it compiles, SHIP IT!"... that attitude is the modus operandi of quite a few coders, who are only marginally more efficient than a million monkeys with typewriters, banging random crap until the output is close enough to the desired result. These people write sloppy, inefficient code; they misread and misunderstand published specs and guides; they make your bleeding-edge video card look worse than the software renderer. These imbeciles are the reason NVidia and ATI need to release "optimized" drivers. In essence, they're fixing other people's mistakes. It's like that fat bald bastard in the LeBaron who can't be bothered to use his turn signals, prompting Chrysler to add a webcam , sophisticated image-processing A.I. and telepathic circuitry to automatically switch on the flicker when lardass is thinking of turning, rather than expecting him to correct his bad ways.
Maybe I'm just a comical psychopath, but every time I hear of Jack Thompson and how he's going to sue all the violence out of this world, I get this recurring daydream of a cheap-suit-wearing scumbag attorney getting blown away by a bunch of satanic chanting school kids armed with 1920's style barrel-loading automatics. Then I get this other daydream where he gets viciously pounded to a bloody mush by a strap-on wielding statuesque porn star Gianna Michaels.
And then I take my meds and it all fades away. No, seriously, this guy's a big old hypocrite. He was born as a result of his folks making whoopy, and he lives in the USA because his ancestors fought independence wars for their freedom. Just because a bunch of looney teenagers go around shooting their classmates up, doesn't mean he can prance around like he's an angel of litigious mercy. I say make a snuff film featuring tommy boy.
Domain names are not real estate. God I'm sick of that flawed analogy.
Domain names online are more like registered trademarks in real life. The difference being that you can't defend a trademark against a newcomer if all you've done with it is sit on it like an egg, which is what these "domainers" do.
I'm in the business of web business, and there is nothing that irritates me more than having an "AHA" moment, and finding out my great fun domain name is already taken by a squatter. They bring NOTHING to the table, and they're stopping me from doing something actually useful with the name rather than throw up a sleazy parking page with its own ad search engine.
I've often negotiated domain names away from their owners, mostly because they were normal people who simply bought a cool domain and lost interest. I've never paid the astronomical prices these squatters try to extort, the most I've paid for a name was $100 and that way mostly because the guy had registered it for 7 years, 2 years in he still just had the registrar's parking page on there. He was happy to recover his investment plus enough for a case of beer, and I was happy to get the name I wanted for a friend's blog.
Hey here's an idea: domain hoarding is like a patent holding company. They cheaply appropriate low-value virtual properties, sit on them forever until some enterprising young fellow with a bright idea comes along, and then pounce on him when the money's good. Now there's a fitting analogy, and we all hate IP warehouses now don't we ?
Oh come on, that's an easy one!
I'd ship her down to wardrobe to have some glasses fitted, then put it in charge of the largest software company in the world.
Hydrasoft: Where are you headed today ?
I'm still waiting for the day we can partition PCs like mainframes, each slice running an independent OS yet sharing all the hardware. Something like VMware ESX, but for the mainstream. Linux on one half, Windows on the other, and the ability to switch between the two at will (or route them to dedicated monitors and input devices). As a software developer, I have three options:
1. Run one main OS, and encapsulate the other in VMware with reduced performance.
2. Run two separate PCs, which means double the cost, double the space, and double the cabling.
3. Dual boot one machine and hope no one's there to point and laugh
Right now I use #2, but it's a pain in the butt. The systems are never pegged and I really just have more hardware than I need. If I could condense the two into one beefy rig and dynamically assign processors/memory to each one as needed, it would not only save me money, but it would make it much easier to maintain as I only have one set of hardware to support rather than 2-3. One power supply, one RAID controller, one chassis to cool.
Oh you have it wrong, sir. These people aren't giving anything back to society. The DVD burning scum I speak of are the bums who pad their social assistance checks by selling movies at $5.00 a pop. They can't be bothered to hold a job, nor speak the language, nor take a bath for that matter, but they can make one hell of a business selling downloaded Telesyncs on a 20-cent el-cheapo blank disc.
Worse yet are the fools who buy the copies and knowingly supporting these bottom-feeders. If you're going to pirate the damned thing, just download it yourself for fuck's sake.
The attacks on civil rights should not be judged based on the events of 9/11. What the government has done, and is continuing to do, should not be tolerated under any circumstances. You shouldn't define your morals based on what the government tells you, that's completely backwards. The government should define their activities based on what their constituents tell the government.
You're either completely absurd or eerily clairvoyant. Either way, you've probably bought from me at OEM Express in Ottawa, I am that rude frenchman!