I respectfully disagree. I found the story moderation concept just meant that I read all the stories in the queue and never went back after they were posted. In other words it detracted from the discussion part that makes slashdot so popular.
I also disagree strongly with eliminiating the anonoymous posting. I think there are good reasons for some people to post anonymously and you take away from the discussion if you eliminate those people.
I'll have to admit that I enjoy the Patrick Bateman posts.. I even get a kick out the the Don Knotts guy although I'm not sure why. There is a big difference between what these guys are doing and what happened to kuro5in. It's kinda like the difference between making a phoney phone call to your neighbors and repeatedly turfing their lawn. One is harmless the other is not.
I think that the clever trolls who post on/. are all a part of the attraction for me and it's one of the reasons I read some of the discussions that I'm really not interested in. It's the angry bitter destructive script kiddies that I'll never quite understand. But such is life.
Re:It didn't last long
on
Geek Flavor
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· Score: 1
yeah.. I kept trying to upload the index.html file and got a permission denied.. so I uploaded index1.html and renamed it to index.html... which lasted for about 30 seconds before it was wiped. I'm guessing some moron has hosed the default permissions...
Emmett had to know this would happen when he posted the story... way to go Emmet, very resonsible of you
I think the biggest problem is that they felt they could not just build a *browser* but rather it has to be a "Web browsing desktop environment" that does everything except re-compile your kernel. I would have been thrilled to have *just* a browser and then all the other mail/news/whatever stuff later. And to be honost about it, since I don't use Netscape for anything except surfing I would have been happy with *just* a browser.
But alas... I just installed Netscape 4.73 and it's patently worse than 4.72 was. It dies twice as much on my box....
Due to some pressures from the open source community Larry Wall has chnged the name of Perl to Perl# and has decided to make it a web-based only language. Larry was quoted as saying "The web is the development language"
No, your mom nor your other family members were concerned about "reusable code". They were concerned about what they could do with that computer when they got it home. What they could do with it is largely influenced by the software that can run on that platform
You seem to have missed my sarcastic laden point. My mom and my sisters bought computers to surf the internet and send email etc. When they went shopping for a computer they purchased a PC with MS windows for one reason only... it's the ONLY thing available. And don't tell me about Mac... they were twice as much $$$. Thus my point is that, while MS may be doing some things the right way, that is not why the "averge" person purchases their products. They purchase them because there are no alternatives
Reusable code, centralized libraries, built in driver support, top of the line development packages, and a whole host of other perfectly good reasons brought the developers to Windows. They in turn brought the users.
I respectfully disagree. Yes MS has done a good job of understanding that if you can lock developers into writing code for Windows then they win. This is something that IBM (OS/2) and Apple could have done a much better job of doing. However It's my experience that most developers are actually just regular people who have families to feed and house payments to make. They develop where the jobs are. That has been pretty much MS Windows since the early 90's. I really don't know how much "re-usable code" ( a buzz prase that I'm already sick of), "centralized libraries" or "built in driver support" was going on in 1994, not much I'm guessing. It's also been my experience that *many* MS developers are quite vocal about what a God awfull mess the Win32 API is. Again, the development community develops for MS because there is very little alternative, nor has there been for quite some time. (if you want to develop commercial apps that is)
Yes, MS has done some things right, but lets be a little more realisitc about the way things have happened.
Interesting viewpoint, considering it's actually their development environment that's responsible for a lot of their success. They've consistently managed to draw developers to their platform, and one of the reasons is they make it ever-easier to produce apps
Welcome to planet earth my friend... I hope you enjoy your stay before returning to your home planet... wherever that may be.
MS has been able to "draw" developers to their platform because they have about 90% (or whatever) marketshare. Developers like to be employed so they can get paid and the such, thus they tend develop for platforms where there are a lot of jobs available.
In some cases..yes. One of the things that makes Perl great (in my mind) is the huge CPAN archive. If you need to do someting quick and dirty with Perl there is a great chance that there is a module hanging out there which will solve your problem. Course that's not what we are really discussing here, but that's a good example of re-usable code.
Probably the _only_ reason M$ has done as well financially as it has is reusable code
So....uh...telll us... what planet are you really from
Yes.. just the other day my mom was shopping for a new computer and I hear her say quite loudly to the sales clerk that she wanted a PC that had only Microsoft software because they have re-usable code. Ha.. ring up another sale for the boys from redmond due to their brilliant re-usable code strategy.
And come to think of it both of my sisters (who both know more about shoes than computers) have stated over and over that they use MS Windows exclusively because of one and only one reason... yep.. you guesed it.. re-usable code. Yet another coup for the brilliant boys at Microsoft.
Amen to that my brother. Back in the day (okay.. a few years ago) I thought slashdot was cool because they seemed to be aimed towards the hard core techy crowd. But now it seems just the opposite, you see a lot of stories linked to that vast wasteland know as ZDnet. Crap... pure crap. I'm not saying that everything on ZDnet is crap.... but they have no credibility as far as I'm concerned because of the almighty Jesse Burst moron. How can you classify them as a "news site" anyways... mostly dribble and hype which will be contradicted next week by the same moronic "writers"... crap.. pure crap....
So yeah.. (slashdot != independent) && (slashdot == entertaining)...so what the hell
Re:This is nothing new. X for Mac has been around.
on
MacOSX and X11
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· Score: 1
For the sweet love of God man.. how about a few extra newlines tossed in there to make that mess readable
It's amazing how a little whitespace can improve readability
Personally, I think it would be a great improvement over the current MS philosophy that any program can grab your attention when it feels like it (v. annoying if your typing something, and another program grabs focus in the middle of it).
Amen to that my brother. IE is the great offender.. I click on the "open in new window" link...then alt-tab to my contact manager software and start to do some work.. and WHAM.. good ol IE decides to just "pop back up" and take charge.. uh... that's just wrong in my book.. wrong and annoying.
I'm not sure I like the idea of my computer trying to "guess" what I want.. if I don't want to be distracted at all.. well I just turn off anything which might distract me. Prettyy simple eh. Besides.. MS usually fails badly when they try to desing software that is *smart* so why should this be any diferent. But I will give them credit for at least trying.
The car in question is my 1996 Red Honda Accord 2 door LX coupe.
Whats good: This thing is a rock. Solid like a rock. It's starts in the morning and goes where you point it, you will be hard pressed to find a more dependable machine on the road. The quality is above average, things seem to fit correctly and tend not to break easily. This is a great car if you are a practicle person who is willing to drop a few bucks for something that's a notch better than the competition.
Whats not so good: It's not a big car and doesn't ride like a big car, not that it rides badly, but it is a smaller car and it rides like one. It's also a bit on the small side on the interior, especially the back seat.
Overall: This car's a Winner with a capital W. Get one.
Most seriously, the government; They made a mockery of "due process". I do agree that Kevin must be pretty retarded for not stopping after getting caught, canned, and released so much, but, if the government wanted to lock his ass up for a few years, least they could've done is come up with a way to do it without violating the Bill of Rights
I would be interested in reading how Kevins's rights were violated. Contrary to the cracker-public opinion, Kevin didn't just sit in jail for a number of years awaiting his trial... he plead guilty to the cell phone fraud stuff and was serving that sentence.. somthing like 3-4 years if memory serves me. I also read quite a bit about how bad Kevin's laywer was... so he might have played a part in the whole mess. The governmet was interested in locking him up for crimes committed and nothing else as far as I can tell.
Remember meatnik? He did more time than many rapists and murderers, and while he cracked a lot of systems and was privy to a lot of confidential information, he never actually stole a single penny. In addition, contrary to official Corporate Myth,[1] he never even caused any damage -- he simply revealed security flaws (which needed to be fixed regardless) in an inappropriate manner in order to feed his own information fetish
Mitnick was a repeat repeat offender. He violated many laws other than "cracking." He served a couple years for cloning cell phones, a crime that he pleaded guilty to, by the way. The thing that made him dangerous was the fact that they kept cathing him and yet he just continued to break the law. So yeah... he's guilty of being a moron more than anything, but he's hardly the poor little vicitmized hacker that some would make him out to be
And considering that Microsoft makes $0.00 from their browser
I'm not so sure about that. Now that they pretty much own the browser market they have a lot of leverage, which they are starting to use, and that leverage translates into $$$$.
For instance, one of the best uses for Linux is to surf the web and do email etc. It's free, stable and your mom could use it once it's setup. But... does your mom want to surf the web with this old netscape browser that randomly dies and fails to render pages on all these neat web sites? No way...adios Linux and hello MS Windows for Mom! And it will just get worse from here my friend...this could kill Linux (on the desktop) more than anything and MS knows it.
I have no love for Microsoft or IE, but I really don't see this as being an issue of anti-competitiveness
Well... maybe it's not anti-competitive... but it means that essentially MS owns and controls HTML. It means that the W3C can pound salt because they will be ignored anyways.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't the end of the world and I firmly believe that the folks at Netscape would so the same thing had they not imploded... but it is a little sad to see the once wide open internet (open as in standards... whatever happened to a well written well thought out RFC...) slowly become the property of Microsoft.
Microsoft also countered the W3C, as it has in the past, by saying that it innovates by shipping products first and works to define standards that will be established later.
Yep... in other words.. if it ships with an MS logo on it then it is the "standard" and the rest of the industry can either follow suit or die.
IRIX is dying but HPUX is going pretty strong. HP has been doing lots of PR and marketing work for HPUX and they have been taking away some of Sun's business. I wouldn't sell them too short just yet. Now with regards to IRIX... yep..IMHO you can put a fork in it unless SGI has something magical up their sleeves...and due to the fact that their stock is just above 4 I would say things look very bad for the SGI people. Sad, but if you refuse to compete on price you will die in todays market.
What to expect from this combination is something along the lines of "TurboLinux Enterprise Edition", with SCO's proprietary technologies and licensed technologies (including CDE) making their way into a Linux distro
And gain what???? I'm not sure why it would be worth the work. I've used CDE on Solaris X86 and I have no problems with it, but with the enormous amounts of development going on with KDE and GNOME why whould anyone bother with CDE today? If anything maybe somebody could purchase SCO and bastardize some of their proprietary tools... and of course the customer database would be valuable... but I'm not sure what anyone would gain by putting CDE into a new Linux distro...
While release numbers are meaningless I have to agree that the gnome folks have come a long way from 1.0 to 1.2.
I tried gnome 1.0 when it was released for a couple weeks before running back to KDE. Gnome 1.0 was pretty much broke as far as I could see, meanwhile kde worked like a charm. Kudos to the KDE team for releasing a stable version and shame on the gnome team.
Now in all fairness I just installed Mandrake 7.1 and decided to give gnome another try (with sawfish) and I have to say that I like it. I like it alot and plan on sticking with it for a while. Not that I have anything against KDE but gnome/sawfish "looks" so much better, and it actually WORKS now. I suppose it's a matter of taste and your's may differ but I am a converted gnomeer.
The really great thing about *nix is that you get a choice... this is a good thing.
Hey...it's the Don Knotts guy!! I haven't seen you around in a while.. Welcome back !!! I know you annoyed many a slashdot reader in the past with your moronic Don Knotts links but I want to let you know that I clicked them each time and usually chuckled when that goofy picture of Don Knotts loaded on my PC.
So thanks for the laughs and long live Don Knotts, the goofiest looking guy on the planet.
I'm the lead developer for a fortune 500 company and I'm not sure if the project I'm working on should be developed in WAP or c# or maybe even KDE... Are there any experts out there who can help me with some on hands on pro's and con's to help me. This is very urgent.
Amen to that my bright brother. I'll never for the life of me understand why the boys in redmond didn't take this opportunity to "do it right" and just screw all that backwards compatability crap. They would be much farther along right now had they done so. If you are going to "start from scratch" why in the name of God would you pollute it with that giant Win32 kludge????
Ah but if MS actually did it the right way us leet *nix guys couldn't feel so superior:)
Uh...er.... we have had text paging via alphanumeric pagers here in the US since the mid to late 80's. Of course it has never been as mobile as it is today, but it's been there. And actually you could do text messaging via PCS phones for the last 4-5 years here in the US.
Also the motorola pagewriter has been around for a few years, sure the coverage sucked, I think Skytell was the only company offering two way with the pagewriter, but it did exist... so...uh...no... this is not new in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I respectfully disagree. I found the story moderation concept just meant that I read all the stories in the queue and never went back after they were posted. In other words it detracted from the discussion part that makes slashdot so popular.
I also disagree strongly with eliminiating the anonoymous posting. I think there are good reasons for some people to post anonymously and you take away from the discussion if you eliminate those people.
I'll have to admit that I enjoy the Patrick Bateman posts.. I even get a kick out the the Don Knotts guy although I'm not sure why.
/. are all a part of the attraction for me and it's one of the reasons I read some of the discussions that I'm really not interested in. It's the angry bitter destructive script kiddies that I'll never quite understand. But such is life.
There is a big difference between what these guys are doing and what happened to kuro5in. It's kinda like the difference between making a phoney phone call to your neighbors and repeatedly turfing their lawn. One is harmless the other is not.
I think that the clever trolls who post on
yeah.. I kept trying to upload the index.html file and got a permission denied.. so I uploaded index1.html and renamed it to index.html... which lasted for about 30 seconds before it was wiped. I'm guessing some moron has hosed the default permissions...
Emmett had to know this would happen when he posted the story... way to go Emmet, very resonsible of you
I think the biggest problem is that they felt they could not just build a *browser* but rather it has to be a "Web browsing desktop environment" that does everything except re-compile your kernel. I would have been thrilled to have *just* a browser and then all the other mail/news/whatever stuff later. And to be honost about it, since I don't use Netscape for anything except surfing I would have been happy with *just* a browser.
But alas... I just installed Netscape 4.73 and it's patently worse than 4.72 was. It dies twice as much on my box....
sigh...
Due to some pressures from the open source community Larry Wall has chnged the name of Perl to Perl# and has decided to make it a web-based only language. Larry was quoted as saying "The web is the development language"
No, your mom nor your other family members were concerned about "reusable code". They were concerned about what they could do with that computer when they got it home. What they could do with it is largely influenced by the software that can run on that platform
You seem to have missed my sarcastic laden point. My mom and my sisters bought computers to surf the internet and send email etc. When they went shopping for a computer they purchased a PC with MS windows for one reason only... it's the ONLY thing available. And don't tell me about Mac... they were twice as much $$$. Thus my point is that, while MS may be doing some things the right way, that is not why the "averge" person purchases their products. They purchase them because there are no alternatives
Reusable code, centralized libraries, built in driver support, top of the line development packages, and a whole host of other perfectly good reasons brought the developers to Windows. They in turn brought the users.
I respectfully disagree. Yes MS has done a good job of understanding that if you can lock developers into writing code for Windows then they win. This is something that IBM (OS/2) and Apple could have done a much better job of doing. However It's my experience that most developers are actually just regular people who have families to feed and house payments to make. They develop where the jobs are. That has been pretty much MS Windows since the early 90's. I really don't know how much "re-usable code" ( a buzz prase that I'm already sick of), "centralized libraries" or "built in driver support" was going on in 1994, not much I'm guessing. It's also been my experience that *many* MS developers are quite vocal about what a God awfull mess the Win32 API is. Again, the development community develops for MS because there is very little alternative, nor has there been for quite some time. (if you want to develop commercial apps that is)
Yes, MS has done some things right, but lets be a little more realisitc about the way things have happened.
Interesting viewpoint, considering it's actually their development environment that's responsible for a lot of their success. They've consistently managed to draw developers to their platform, and one of the reasons is they make it ever-easier to produce apps
Welcome to planet earth my friend... I hope you enjoy your stay before returning to your home planet... wherever that may be.
MS has been able to "draw" developers to their platform because they have about 90% (or whatever) marketshare. Developers like to be employed so they can get paid and the such, thus they tend develop for platforms where there are a lot of jobs available.
Is resusable code *really* that great?
In some cases..yes. One of the things that makes Perl great (in my mind) is the huge CPAN archive. If you need to do someting quick and dirty with Perl there is a great chance that there is a module hanging out there which will solve your problem. Course that's not what we are really discussing here, but that's a good example of re-usable code.
Probably the _only_ reason M$ has done as well financially as it has is reusable code
So....uh...telll us... what planet are you really from
Yes.. just the other day my mom was shopping for a new computer and I hear her say quite loudly to the sales clerk that she wanted a PC that had only Microsoft software because they have re-usable code. Ha.. ring up another sale for the boys from redmond due to their brilliant re-usable code strategy.
And come to think of it both of my sisters (who both know more about shoes than computers) have stated over and over that they use MS Windows exclusively because of one and only one reason... yep.. you guesed it.. re-usable code. Yet another coup for the brilliant boys at Microsoft.
sigh....
Amen to that my brother. Back in the day (okay.. a few years ago) I thought slashdot was cool because they seemed to be aimed towards the hard core techy crowd. But now it seems just the opposite, you see a lot of stories linked to that vast wasteland know as ZDnet. Crap... pure crap. I'm not saying that everything on ZDnet is crap.... but they have no credibility as far as I'm concerned because of the almighty Jesse Burst moron. How can you classify them as a "news site" anyways... mostly dribble and hype which will be contradicted next week by the same moronic "writers"... crap .. pure crap....
...so what the hell
So yeah.. (slashdot != independent) && (slashdot == entertaining)
For the sweet love of God man.. how about a few extra newlines tossed in there to make that mess readable
It's amazing how a little whitespace can improve readability
Personally, I think it would be a great improvement over the current MS philosophy that any program can grab your attention when it feels like it (v. annoying if your typing something, and another program grabs focus in the middle of it).
Amen to that my brother. IE is the great offender.. I click on the "open in new window" link...then alt-tab to my contact manager software and start to do some work.. and WHAM.. good ol IE decides to just "pop back up" and take charge.. uh... that's just wrong in my book.. wrong and annoying.
I'm not sure I like the idea of my computer trying to "guess" what I want.. if I don't want to be distracted at all.. well I just turn off anything which might distract me. Prettyy simple eh. Besides.. MS usually fails badly when they try to desing software that is *smart* so why should this be any diferent. But I will give them credit for at least trying.
Well.. what the hell... I'm qaulified.
The car in question is my 1996 Red Honda Accord 2 door LX coupe.
Whats good:
This thing is a rock. Solid like a rock. It's starts in the morning and goes where you point it, you will be hard pressed to find a more dependable machine on the road. The quality is above average, things seem to fit correctly and tend not to break easily. This is a great car if you are a practicle person who is willing to drop a few bucks for something that's a notch better than the competition.
Whats not so good:
It's not a big car and doesn't ride like a big car, not that it rides badly, but it is a smaller car and it rides like one. It's also a bit on the small side on the interior, especially the back seat.
Overall:
This car's a Winner with a capital W. Get one.
Most seriously, the government; They made a mockery of "due process". I do agree that Kevin must be pretty retarded for not stopping after getting caught, canned, and released so much, but, if the government wanted to lock his ass up for a few years, least they could've done is come up with a way to do it without violating the Bill of Rights
I would be interested in reading how Kevins's rights were violated. Contrary to the cracker-public opinion, Kevin didn't just sit in jail for a number of years awaiting his trial... he plead guilty to the cell phone fraud stuff and was serving that sentence.. somthing like 3-4 years if memory serves me. I also read quite a bit about how bad Kevin's laywer was... so he might have played a part in the whole mess. The governmet was interested in locking him up for crimes committed and nothing else as far as I can tell.
Remember meatnik? He did more time than many rapists and murderers, and while he cracked a lot of systems and was privy to a lot of confidential information, he never actually stole a single penny. In addition, contrary to official Corporate Myth,[1] he never even caused any damage -- he simply revealed security flaws (which needed to be fixed regardless) in an inappropriate manner in order to feed his own information fetish
Mitnick was a repeat repeat offender. He violated many laws other than "cracking." He served a couple years for cloning cell phones, a crime that he pleaded guilty to, by the way. The thing that made him dangerous was the fact that they kept cathing him and yet he just continued to break the law. So yeah... he's guilty of being a moron more than anything, but he's hardly the poor little vicitmized hacker that some would make him out to be
And considering that Microsoft makes $0.00 from their browser
I'm not so sure about that. Now that they pretty much own the browser market they have a lot of leverage, which they are starting to use, and that leverage translates into $$$$.
For instance, one of the best uses for Linux is to surf the web and do email etc. It's free, stable and your mom could use it once it's setup. But... does your mom want to surf the web with this old netscape browser that randomly dies and fails to render pages on all these neat web sites? No way...adios Linux and hello MS Windows for Mom! And it will just get worse from here my friend...this could kill Linux (on the desktop) more than anything and MS knows it.
I have no love for Microsoft or IE, but I really don't see this as being an issue of anti-competitiveness
Well... maybe it's not anti-competitive... but it means that essentially MS owns and controls HTML. It means that the W3C can pound salt because they will be ignored anyways.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't the end of the world and I firmly believe that the folks at Netscape would so the same thing had they not imploded... but it is a little sad to see the once wide open internet (open as in standards... whatever happened to a well written well thought out RFC...) slowly become the property of Microsoft.
Microsoft also countered the W3C, as it has in the past, by saying that it innovates by shipping products first and works to define standards that will be established later.
Yep... in other words.. if it ships with an MS logo on it then it is the "standard" and the rest of the industry can either follow suit or die.
IRIX and HPUX are slowly dying
IRIX is dying but HPUX is going pretty strong. HP has been doing lots of PR and marketing work for HPUX and they have been taking away some of Sun's business. I wouldn't sell them too short just yet. Now with regards to IRIX... yep..IMHO you can put a fork in it unless SGI has something magical up their sleeves...and due to the fact that their stock is just above 4 I would say things look very bad for the SGI people. Sad, but if you refuse to compete on price you will die in todays market.
What to expect from this combination is something along the lines of "TurboLinux Enterprise Edition", with SCO's proprietary technologies and licensed technologies (including CDE) making their way into a Linux distro
And gain what???? I'm not sure why it would be worth the work. I've used CDE on Solaris X86 and I have no problems with it, but with the enormous amounts of development going on with KDE and GNOME why whould anyone bother with CDE today? If anything maybe somebody could purchase SCO and bastardize some of their proprietary tools... and of course the customer database would be valuable... but I'm not sure what anyone would gain by putting CDE into a new Linux distro...
While release numbers are meaningless I have to agree that the gnome folks have come a long way from 1.0 to 1.2.
I tried gnome 1.0 when it was released for a couple weeks before running back to KDE. Gnome 1.0 was pretty much broke as far as I could see, meanwhile kde worked like a charm. Kudos to the KDE team for releasing a stable version and shame on the gnome team.
Now in all fairness I just installed Mandrake 7.1 and decided to give gnome another try (with sawfish) and I have to say that I like it. I like it alot and plan on sticking with it for a while. Not that I have anything against KDE but gnome/sawfish "looks" so much better, and it actually WORKS now. I suppose it's a matter of taste and your's may differ but I am a converted gnomeer.
The really great thing about *nix is that you get a choice... this is a good thing.
Hey...it's the Don Knotts guy!! I haven't seen you around in a while.. Welcome back !!! I know you annoyed many a slashdot reader in the past with your moronic Don Knotts links but I want to let you know that I clicked them each time and usually chuckled when that goofy picture of Don Knotts loaded on my PC.
So thanks for the laughs and long live Don Knotts, the goofiest looking guy on the planet.
If you notice, the bit about DNA is just a throw-away at the bottom of the article. The main purpose of this is to scan for explosives residue
Sheesh....yeah... I stopped reading before I even got to the DNA stuff. Seems like slashdot is getting closer to ZDnet every day...
"Come to slashdot and let Commander Taco tell you the 10 reasons why you should be afraid of Win2000!"
"Visit slashdot and listen to Commander Taco tell you the insider scoop on illegal DNA testing that is happening to you without your permission!"
"Click to slashdot now to read about the hidden secrets in Linux which the NSA doesn't want you to know!!"
"Read slashdot to find out why Comannder Taco says you could lose your job due to an error in Win98!!"
What....sigh....
I'm so so confused...
I'm the lead developer for a fortune 500 company and I'm not sure if the project I'm working on should be developed in WAP or c# or maybe even KDE... Are there any experts out there who can help me with some on hands on pro's and con's to help me. This is very urgent.
Thanks.
Amen to that my bright brother. I'll never for the life of me understand why the boys in redmond didn't take this opportunity to "do it right" and just screw all that backwards compatability crap. They would be much farther along right now had they done so. If you are going to "start from scratch" why in the name of God would you pollute it with that giant Win32 kludge????
:)
Ah but if MS actually did it the right way us leet *nix guys couldn't feel so superior
Uh...er.... we have had text paging via alphanumeric pagers here in the US since the mid to late 80's. Of course it has never been as mobile as it is today, but it's been there. And actually you could do text messaging via PCS phones for the last 4-5 years here in the US.
Also the motorola pagewriter has been around for a few years, sure the coverage sucked, I think Skytell was the only company offering two way with the pagewriter, but it did exist... so...uh...no... this is not new in the US.