AOL has millions of users. If I sell a POP3-based e-mail spam filtering product, that's millions people who can't use it. It's countless tech support calls from AOL users...
Absolutely wrong. AOL users are people who don't want to buy/install/manage spam filtering software. Instead they pay AOL for internet access and filtering their e-mails. Of course, they don't have a choice of filtering software - only AOL's own, but AOL's users don't care. They want to access internet, they don't want to be system/mail administrators.
It is like conferencing capability of your home phone line - some people prefer to buy their own conferencing hardware, but most would pay their phone provider. Only businesses pay for their own conferencing hardware. Of course, businesses don't buy AOL.
My question would be, "Who are they screw-heads, and why should I PAY them?!"
A more interesting question is why should I pay THEM?
Even assuming the copyright infringment was proven, still why should one pay some random organizations for all the CDs he had? Obviously this Danish organization does not own the copyrights of all the CDs that were traded. So who they are?
Yeah, for bigger projects we have blackmail bisiness model (when the company releases the project for free including the source code, waits for it to become popular, and demands money for security fixes - yes, I am talking about bind).
I can't help but feel like the end of the "build-it-yourself computer" era is near. Things are getting smaller and smaller.
Come on, it is only starting to come back! When I entered university (1990), most of the higher students were building computers for themselves and for friends. And guess the size? Those (mostly 8080-based) computers fit completely into keyboad! (the only external part was optional regular cassette recorder used as external data storage).
Of course, the way you built your box was different - you did not just fit two-three parts together, you bought all parts separately and had to use soldering iron.
Of course, it is hard to solder CPU to motherboard at home now, but still miniaturization is good thing. I am waiting for return of those times when your computer was all inside your keyboard, and when it produced no noise at all!
Wrong. I live in Washington state, and I am Verizon customer (phone + DSL), as most of people around (Quest is present here too).
I was very happy with Verizon figting with FBI about its customer privacy. Not happy at all now. Looks like Verizon only value customer privacy until they have a chance to make money from violating it.
I removed Microsoft from my "trusted publishers" list a long time ago ; )
How did it got there? This list is empty on clean install. To be able to remove something from "trusted publishers", you have to add it to this list first.
So you clicked "trust Microsoft" link to be able to remove it later. Are you sadomasochist?;)
Until--as the artical pointed out--the xBox is sold 2nd-hand to some completely inocent person.
Assume you are a "completely inocent person" who bought a 2nd-hand car. Later it turned out the previous owner drowned it, so it is all rusty inside, does not drive, breaks, etc. Would you blame the car manufacturer or the person you bought it from for this?
Why do you like to blame Microsoft for somebody selling crippled Xbox'es?
Did you read the article? It essentially states that people are being permanently (FOREVER!!!) banned from XBox live (which they paid for), using the Xbox, which they paid for, if it had a mod chip installed.
You are wrong: people were not "permanently (FOREVER!!!) banned from Xbox live". Only their modded Xbox'es were.
They are not "using the Xbox, which they paid for", they are using modded Xbox. Makes the difference, does not it?
I agree - but they should at least refund people's money or properly warn them in the first place.
I think people who installed mod chips pretty well know what they were doing. Also, XBox 'box' probably contains lots of labels warning users that opening the case breaks any warranty.
A patent which, if you check [eolas.com] was first demonstrated in 1993 (when WWW traffic was 1% of the whole backbone) and filed in '94.
That is interesting. AFAIK the public demonstration makes the thing "prior art" and prevents you from filing patent. I was advised by my company lowers that any patent on our software should be filed before first public beta, otherwises it becomes common knowlegde. So patent "demonstrated publicly in 1993" and "Filed in October, 1994" is automatically void, is not it?
Microsoft does not have to do anything. Slashdot users will do the retaliation instead!
From now on, every IT vendor knows: if he turns away from Microsoft and uses other's products, an article describing this will be immediately published on/. and his Web site will be immediately slashdot'ed.
This will obviously stop those IT vendors from doing such a crasy thing.
There are lots of similar product on the market.
My friend used one. The quality was quite acceptable for noisy Acura Integra. I.e. there was probably some noise introduced by adapter, but it was negligeable compared to wind and tire noise.
P.S. Of course the device is fully compatible with any player with standard output, not just THEIR MP3 CD players.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES!
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Not because it's not interesting and efective technology, but because we Americans don't like mass transit.
Americans don't like mass transit because they never had good mass transit. All mass transit talks here in Seattle are about freeing freeways during peak hours. Thus, when they plan bus schedule, they only plan for those peak hours. So there are lots of busses during the peak, but most routes end completely after 8PM. Also most routes go along the highways, so you still need a car to go to
'park & ride'.
Looks like the busses here don't serve their passengers, but serve those traveling by car (by removing other's cars during peak hours).
So I use the car only because I may sometimes (3-5%) need it. If the bus was available (at least once an hour) anytime it is needed, I would not use my car and switch to bus.
I talked with American (car mechanic ironically) who just returned from a trip to Russia, and he was amazed by availability of all the options of mass transit - buses that go 24 hour a day, trams, trains that go to almost every town (and do this often and fast). He traveled by mass transit, and he traveled a lot. Tired after the plain, he was so annoyed that he had to drive 4 hours to his home town, instead of sleeping those 4 hours in the train:)
Joe User BUYS a package with RedHat 8.0 form a computer store. They expect that if they have a problem with a program, RedHat is the correct address for the bug-report.
If he expects this, he probably did not read the lisence argreement. All RedHat (and most other Linux vendor) promise him is limited installation technical support, which means: we'll help you with basic installation of RedHat, and we are not responsible for any bugs, applications not running, or anything else.
brak.slashdot.org does not help at all
on
Slashdot is Moving
·
· Score: 2
You can use brak.slashdot.org for a few days if your DNS is slow to catch up to reality.
This advice looks good first, but does not help at all: the only thing one can read at brak.slashdot.org is list of articles. When I click the article to see the discussion, I am redirected to http://slashdot.org. This brings up the question: what is the point of using absolute URLs (http://slashdot.org/blah) instead of relative ones (/blah) which would allow me to browse brak.slashdot.org?
The reason AOL kept AIM and ICQ separate is purely political: they didn't want the competition to connect to AIM.
Maybe they don't want the number of users that they can report to shrink in a moment they merge networks?
Today they have 130M ICQ users plus 160M AOL IM users. If they merge the networks, those 100M who have both ICQ and IM running will have no reason to do this anymore and choose one of them. So instead of 300M combined users AOL will have "only" 200M:)
Ok.. You maintain one machine, and it only manages 1 to 2 months uptime..
I don't maintain it, I ignore it. And 1 or 2 month of uptime is due to rare cases when I do decide to "maintain" it (intall any updates and reboot).
We have quite a few Windows workstations (say 20-30), running 98 through XP.
Well, if you run Win98, it is expected that it "just happens". But the only blue screen I saw from XP was because of original NVidia XP drivers, and since I upgraded to newer one, I never saw a crash.
My Windows workstations usually manage 1 week before some mystery problem arises.
The word "mystery problem" explains why it does this. You don't look to be good as Windows admin - nobody calls NT/W2K/XP "Windows workstations" - it is either NT, or W2k, or XP. Windows (95, 98, ME) are not good as workstations, you know.
Probabaly you happen to be a good Unix admin, and if your Unix box has any problem, you investigate and fix it. But all these problems with your NT/W2K/XP remain a "mystery" to you, are not being fixed, and result in weekly crashed.
It just proves that admin is more important than software. Unix admin managing NT boxes is as pathetic as NT admin managing Unix.
I personally maintain (i.e. check it once a month) a small W2K box that serves as build verification and distibution server - whenever somebody checks anything into source control, it starts a build, publishes binaries for test team, sends mail to offenders if there are any problems, etc. It also host IIS server with XML Web Services interface, so people can programmaticaly check build status.
The typical uptime of this server is a month or two (500-1000 builds), and is only limited by myself installing service packs and rebooting it.
Slashdot Mirror
These files can contain trojan too, and most "modern" trojans are written in some interpreted script, not in C. How about detecting this?
Absolutely wrong. AOL users are people who don't want to buy/install/manage spam filtering software. Instead they pay AOL for internet access and filtering their e-mails. Of course, they don't have a choice of filtering software - only AOL's own, but AOL's users don't care. They want to access internet, they don't want to be system/mail administrators.
It is like conferencing capability of your home phone line - some people prefer to buy their own conferencing hardware, but most would pay their phone provider. Only businesses pay for their own conferencing hardware. Of course, businesses don't buy AOL.
1.ToString();
"abc".Substring( 1, 2 );
You can't expect any good mainframe developed in the year Leonardo da Vinci was born. All mainframes from the middle of 15th century suck, my word!
On the other hand, if you mainfraim was from the end of 15th century, you could at least expect this genius to do something about it.
Most of them have keyboards. The only requirement is to be able to flip the keyboard under monitor so that notebook turns into tablet.
A more interesting question is why should I pay THEM?
Even assuming the copyright infringment was proven, still why should one pay some random organizations for all the CDs he had? Obviously this Danish organization does not own the copyrights of all the CDs that were traded. So who they are?
But it is free (as in speech), so should not you just rewrite save code for yourself to always save in Word97 mode?
Yeah, for bigger projects we have blackmail bisiness model (when the company releases the project for free including the source code, waits for it to become popular, and demands money for security fixes - yes, I am talking about bind).
Come on, it is only starting to come back! When I entered university (1990), most of the higher students were building computers for themselves and for friends. And guess the size? Those (mostly 8080-based) computers fit completely into keyboad! (the only external part was optional regular cassette recorder used as external data storage). Of course, the way you built your box was different - you did not just fit two-three parts together, you bought all parts separately and had to use soldering iron.
Of course, it is hard to solder CPU to motherboard at home now, but still miniaturization is good thing. I am waiting for return of those times when your computer was all inside your keyboard, and when it produced no noise at all!
I was very happy with Verizon figting with FBI about its customer privacy. Not happy at all now. Looks like Verizon only value customer privacy until they have a chance to make money from violating it.
How did it got there? This list is empty on clean install. To be able to remove something from "trusted publishers", you have to add it to this list first.
So you clicked "trust Microsoft" link to be able to remove it later. Are you sadomasochist? ;)
Assume you are a "completely inocent person" who bought a 2nd-hand car. Later it turned out the previous owner drowned it, so it is all rusty inside, does not drive, breaks, etc. Would you blame the car manufacturer or the person you bought it from for this?
Why do you like to blame Microsoft for somebody selling crippled Xbox'es?
You are wrong: people were not "permanently (FOREVER!!!) banned from Xbox live". Only their modded Xbox'es were.
They are not "using the Xbox, which they paid for", they are using modded Xbox. Makes the difference, does not it?
The difference is that those non-modded boxs have the warranty, and thus will be fixed or replaced (or the server software updated).
I think people who installed mod chips pretty well know what they were doing. Also, XBox 'box' probably contains lots of labels warning users that opening the case breaks any warranty.
Now I wonder how many unclosed bugs will be in Linux database when 2.6 is released? Will this be Microsoft's turn to laugh?
That is interesting. AFAIK the public demonstration makes the thing "prior art" and prevents you from filing patent. I was advised by my company lowers that any patent on our software should be filed before first public beta, otherwises it becomes common knowlegde. So patent "demonstrated publicly in 1993" and "Filed in October, 1994" is automatically void, is not it?
From now on, every IT vendor knows: if he turns away from Microsoft and uses other's products, an article describing this will be immediately published on /. and his Web site will be immediately slashdot'ed.
This will obviously stop those IT vendors from doing such a crasy thing.
P.S. Of course the device is fully compatible with any player with standard output, not just THEIR MP3 CD players.
Looks like the busses here don't serve their passengers, but serve those traveling by car (by removing other's cars during peak hours).
So I use the car only because I may sometimes (3-5%) need it. If the bus was available (at least once an hour) anytime it is needed, I would not use my car and switch to bus.
I talked with American (car mechanic ironically) who just returned from a trip to Russia, and he was amazed by availability of all the options of mass transit - buses that go 24 hour a day, trams, trains that go to almost every town (and do this often and fast). He traveled by mass transit, and he traveled a lot. Tired after the plain, he was so annoyed that he had to drive 4 hours to his home town, instead of sleeping those 4 hours in the train :)
If he expects this, he probably did not read the lisence argreement. All RedHat (and most other Linux vendor) promise him is limited installation technical support, which means: we'll help you with basic installation of RedHat, and we are not responsible for any bugs, applications not running, or anything else.
Today they have 130M ICQ users plus 160M AOL IM users. If they merge the networks, those 100M who have both ICQ and IM running will have no reason to do this anymore and choose one of them. So instead of 300M combined users AOL will have "only" 200M :)
Probabaly you happen to be a good Unix admin, and if your Unix box has any problem, you investigate and fix it. But all these problems with your NT/W2K/XP remain a "mystery" to you, are not being fixed, and result in weekly crashed.
It just proves that admin is more important than software. Unix admin managing NT boxes is as pathetic as NT admin managing Unix.
I personally maintain (i.e. check it once a month) a small W2K box that serves as build verification and distibution server - whenever somebody checks anything into source control, it starts a build, publishes binaries for test team, sends mail to offenders if there are any problems, etc. It also host IIS server with XML Web Services interface, so people can programmaticaly check build status.
The typical uptime of this server is a month or two (500-1000 builds), and is only limited by myself installing service packs and rebooting it.