Untrue - in an uncontrolled free market, a single highly successfull company will always be able to dominated and control the market, over a period of time.
First of all, no, not ALWAYS will one company dominate for a long period of time. There are plenty of markets that have never been dominated by any one company for long. We have monopoly laws to prevent abuse of monopoly power, not to prevent monopolies. Those are legal.
Your MS analgy is flawed - they dominate 95% of the DESKTOP market, and there is only one operating system competing with Windows on the desktop. Linux and other free software do not compete.
I'm not talking about 'compete' in the business sense, I'm talking about reality and the freedom to choose. You can use Linux, MacOS, BeOS, Windows, FreeBSD, AtheOS, and an assortment of Unix flavors as your desktop OS. That was just an example to show that there is always more than one choice in a free market system.
His concept of journalism falls neatly into the 10 o'clock news scaremongering school of thought. He'd 'break the news' on Bill Gates' army of cyborg warriors if it would get his column some hits.
So what you're saying, on both counts, is that Slashdot should seriously consider hiring him for a job as editor?
Others might say that the first ammendment protects speech as a form of communicating with other human being, a radical idea that might entitle people to a reasonable access to communication media.
How do you leap from protected speech as a form of communicating, to ENTITLEMENT?
But here is the point! 110 to 14. What if in 5 years the trend follows and there is really only 1? Then you have no choice.
You've distorted the facts. The quote said, "In March, just 14 companies controlled 60 percent of users' online time, down from 110 companies two years earlier..."
There are WAY MORE than just 14 service providers in the world. It's just that there are 14 really huge providers, like AOL, Earthlink, etc. In a capitalist society, you will ALWAYS have more than one choice.
Look at the operating system market. Microsoft dominates with roughly 95% of the market. Yet you still have dozens of operating systems to choose from.
"We need to catch them, and place them in a position whereby they are seen for what they are -- a terrorist," Cooper said.
Since some people are confused, let's look it up in the dictionary.
terrorist n. One that engages in acts or an act of terrorism.
terrorism n. The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
Now, I do agree that a skilled person could use computer viruses for the purposes of terrorism, as defined above. But clearly 99% of viruses do not fall into the category of terrorism, and therefore calling their creators terrorists is quite a stretch. Most of them are smart young people with no common sense, no direction, and a distorted sense of right and wrong... a.k.a. criminals.
I'm sure Russ Cooper is more interested in getting his site linked from wired, and knows mentioning the buzzword 'terrorist' is sure to get a soundbyte.
currently, an ISP can pull your service for any reason whatsoever
And you can change ISP's for any reason whatsoever. There's plenty to choose from, thanks to capitalism.
Thus, if you post any content (say, a Christian website, for example) that someone finds objectionable, you could lose your right to free speech without so much as a court battle.
Eeeh gads, you haven't lost any rights in this case! You simply lost access to service from a particular company.
Imagine you created a commercial, and you wanted to pay a television network to air it. They air it, receive complaints, and decide not to air it any more. Have you lost free speech rights? Of course not, you can approach any number of other networks and cable stations to get them to air it. You can broadcast your message in other mediums.
Your right to free speech doesn't guarantee that you are going to be able to physically get your message out to other people, only that you have the right to express your views.
Access to the Internet should be federalized and regulated like the utilities
Oh god that's just what we need... another branch of the government. Let's see, would you like the FCC to control it? They're doing a wonderful job of preserving free speech on the public airwaves, aren't they? Ahem...
BeOS was coming close to being ready for main stream, if they could have held out till the microsoft case was at this point they could have secured some major pc sellers to install BeOS right next to Windows
OK, but re-read my post. My point was they COULD NOT have held out this long. Burning 10x as much cash per month means they would have gone belly-up 10x faster then they did.
The only hope for BeOS fans like myself is if Palm will license it to BeUnited (doubtful), or if OpenBeOS can stick with things long enough to get an open source imitation of BeOS going. (Eventually that could pick up the same momentum as Linux.)
a picture of JLG standing next to one with his head down in shame for his bad idea to "Focus Shift" the company down the tube.
Yeah, it would have been much nicer of them to go out of business many months ago trying to sell regular BeOS. (They were burning 10 times as much cash per month before the focus shift, and still not bringing in any money -- you do the math.)
On another note, I am firmly convinced that the reason OSX is slow is Mach. Experience in my department has established that throughput on a loaded server with a microkernel-based OS (MkLinux with a Debian binary set) is a good 30-50% slower than with a non-microkernel OS (monolithic Linux kernel with the *same* binary set). That is not a performance loss to sneeze at, no matter how great microkernels are.
Here is an interview with David Nagel discussing some of Palm's plans for the Be assets. This second story is from OSOpinion, and is more speculation about a BeOS based 32-bit OS for Palm due in 2002.
If only Be had released the source under the GPL prior to going under
Ummm, Be sold BeOS to Palm to gain $11,000,000, to pay off creditors and try to give some money back to the shareholders that poured a shitload of money into BEOS (for example, ME).
On top of that, for the upteenth million time, BeOS could NOT have been open-sourced, because it contained a lot of code that was not Be's to give away. Obviously they did not feel putting a ton of engineers on the task of preparing the source code to be given away.
How Slashdot has a big story on how one of MS's chief competitors lost a lawsuit, while places like MSNBC are running the story that XP lets pirates take over your entire computer?
I'd prefer it if they just wouldn't post anything about MS unless its related to Linux
Then I guess you'd be shocked to find out the percentage of people browsing this site via Windows, eh? Hint: It's larger than the percentage viewing it from Linux.
I love this kind of 'review.' Absolutely no spoilers, just an overall reaction to the film.
Why the hell would I want to read an in-depth review of a film that I am getting ready to go see? It's almost as bad as those trailers that give you a summary of the movie instead of a teaser...
It somtimes amazes me that politicians would pass up such an excellent opportunity to please the electorate at so little political cost to themselves - why not just ban spam?
The posters mention of being on the "far side of the bell curve" raises an interesting question - how is Spam distributed? Obviously, it's not a bell curve; a significant number of people are getting as much Spam at the submitter, and a significant number of people are getting none. If 5% of "users" (do they mean user/person or user/address?) are getting as much Spam as the submitter, and everyone else is getting next to none, than Spam is not nearly as much of a problem as this article indicates.
Well first off, it's not the submitter you're quoting, but CmdrTaco. The reason he gets a lot of spam is either because he (a) runs a popular site that features his email address, and/or (b) subscribes to a lot of porn* sites.
I'll let you decide.
* Please note that I did not use the incredibly lame, old spelling, "pr0n."
Fucking buy the console you like, play the fucking games you like, and be happy!
Merry fucking Christmas.
Re:Value added or just paying for bandwidth?
on
Ximian Adds Subscription
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How can consumers be sure they're not just throttling what they used to give away for free and that what they're charging is fair?
What does it matter? They could charge $50 a month if they wanted. The question is quite simply: Do you feel it is worth it? If not, then don't pay it. If so, then pay it. Then Ximian will make marketing decisions based on the number of people that subscribe.
That's how capitalism works. You get to decide pricing indirectly, not directly!
Seriously, look at it [amdzone.com]. it looks like a very interesting product, with nice specs, but whos gonna buy it?
Oh I dunno, someone who like surfing the web from anywhere in and around their house, instead of being chained to their desk, or forced to sit uncomfortably with a hot laptop on their lap?
Don't get me wrong, this device looks like shit, but the idea sounds wonderful.
Er, I don't know about you, but most of the time, I am entering familiar filenames in familiar directory hierarchies (do you really spend the majority of your time in unknown territory?).
And, using MSWindows' braindead file selection dialog, it's equally slow, every time.
This is humorous, since you can just as easily type the name of the directories/files in a windows app's file selection dialog box, just as you would on the commandline. Better yet, autocompletion is available without having to hit TAB all the time!
Of course, if you spent as much time learning the tricks of the GUI as you do the CLI, you might already know this.
If you don't know they're names, then how do you know where you're supposed to be going?
Two scenarios.
First, let's say you're just browsing through your file system looking for something. Each time you expand the directory, you instantly see the ones below it, and with a simple click can expand the directory of your choice... ad infinitum. Way faster than typing the first few letters, hitting tab, typing 'ls' or 'dir' and ENTER, etc.
Second scenario, you know approximately where you want to get to, but the folder is buried deep. Click, click, click, click, click, click. You're there. With CLI, you're trying to remember the sequence of folder names to get where you want, much slower.
Some things you can do faster in CLI. Navigating a directory structure is not one of them.
Especially with win2000/XP automatic detection of USB devices it could be used as a effective delivery device for worm/virus packages to machines without or with protected email and Internet access.
FUD. Or please explain how exactly you are going to get it to execute anything when plugged in? When you plug this in, it's like plugging in a CF memory card. XP might ask you whether you want to download pictures/music off it, but other than that its harmless.
This guy is probably not even a member of Al Qaeda
If you read the article, you'd see they have some proof of his membership in al Qaeda. For example, he told them al Qaeda would soon hit the Indian parliament, and a couple days later terrorists attacked that parliament with guns and grenades.
Every time I see someone use a keyboard based navigation tool (Windows Commander comes to my mind, or bash completion), they're about ten times faster than click-move-click-move sequences.
This is absurd. Perhaps if they are navigating a tree of folders they are intimately familiar with, but I can navigate a tree or set of folders much quicker with a mouse then a CL and autocomplete. Especially if the folder names are unknown to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Untrue - in an uncontrolled free market, a single highly successfull company will always be able to dominated and control the market, over a period of time.
First of all, no, not ALWAYS will one company dominate for a long period of time. There are plenty of markets that have never been dominated by any one company for long. We have monopoly laws to prevent abuse of monopoly power, not to prevent monopolies. Those are legal.
Your MS analgy is flawed - they dominate 95% of the DESKTOP market, and there is only one operating system competing with Windows on the desktop. Linux and other free software do not compete.
I'm not talking about 'compete' in the business sense, I'm talking about reality and the freedom to choose. You can use Linux, MacOS, BeOS, Windows, FreeBSD, AtheOS, and an assortment of Unix flavors as your desktop OS. That was just an example to show that there is always more than one choice in a free market system.
His concept of journalism falls neatly into the 10 o'clock news scaremongering school of thought. He'd 'break the news' on Bill Gates' army of cyborg warriors if it would get his column some hits.
So what you're saying, on both counts, is that Slashdot should seriously consider hiring him for a job as editor?
Others might say that the first ammendment protects speech as a form of communicating with other human being, a radical idea that might entitle people to a reasonable access to communication media.
How do you leap from protected speech as a form of communicating, to ENTITLEMENT?
But here is the point! 110 to 14. What if in 5 years the trend follows and there is really only 1? Then you have no choice.
You've distorted the facts. The quote said, "In March, just 14 companies controlled 60 percent of users' online time, down from 110 companies two years earlier..."
There are WAY MORE than just 14 service providers in the world. It's just that there are 14 really huge providers, like AOL, Earthlink, etc. In a capitalist society, you will ALWAYS have more than one choice.
Look at the operating system market. Microsoft dominates with roughly 95% of the market. Yet you still have dozens of operating systems to choose from.
Since some people are confused, let's look it up in the dictionary.
Now, I do agree that a skilled person could use computer viruses for the purposes of terrorism, as defined above. But clearly 99% of viruses do not fall into the category of terrorism, and therefore calling their creators terrorists is quite a stretch. Most of them are smart young people with no common sense, no direction, and a distorted sense of right and wrong
I'm sure Russ Cooper is more interested in getting his site linked from wired, and knows mentioning the buzzword 'terrorist' is sure to get a soundbyte.
currently, an ISP can pull your service for any reason whatsoever
And you can change ISP's for any reason whatsoever. There's plenty to choose from, thanks to capitalism.
Thus, if you post any content (say, a Christian website, for example) that someone finds objectionable, you could lose your right to free speech without so much as a court battle.
Eeeh gads, you haven't lost any rights in this case! You simply lost access to service from a particular company.
Imagine you created a commercial, and you wanted to pay a television network to air it. They air it, receive complaints, and decide not to air it any more. Have you lost free speech rights? Of course not, you can approach any number of other networks and cable stations to get them to air it. You can broadcast your message in other mediums.
Your right to free speech doesn't guarantee that you are going to be able to physically get your message out to other people, only that you have the right to express your views.
Access to the Internet should be federalized and regulated like the utilities
Oh god that's just what we need... another branch of the government. Let's see, would you like the FCC to control it? They're doing a wonderful job of preserving free speech on the public airwaves, aren't they? Ahem...
BeOS was coming close to being ready for main stream, if they could have held out till the microsoft case was at this point they could have secured some major pc sellers to install BeOS right next to Windows
OK, but re-read my post. My point was they COULD NOT have held out this long. Burning 10x as much cash per month means they would have gone belly-up 10x faster then they did.
The only hope for BeOS fans like myself is if Palm will license it to BeUnited (doubtful), or if OpenBeOS can stick with things long enough to get an open source imitation of BeOS going. (Eventually that could pick up the same momentum as Linux.)
a picture of JLG standing next to one with his head down in shame for his bad idea to "Focus Shift" the company down the tube.
Yeah, it would have been much nicer of them to go out of business many months ago trying to sell regular BeOS. (They were burning 10 times as much cash per month before the focus shift, and still not bringing in any money -- you do the math.)
Mmm... LotR in DVD-quality through VOD...
Even better...LotR in DVD-quality through a DVD... Mmmm
On another note, I am firmly convinced that the reason OSX is slow is Mach. Experience in my department has established that throughput on a loaded server with a microkernel-based OS (MkLinux with a Debian binary set) is a good 30-50% slower than with a non-microkernel OS (monolithic Linux kernel with the *same* binary set). That is not a performance loss to sneeze at, no matter how great microkernels are.
Then how do you explain the great speed of BeOS?
Here is an interview with David Nagel discussing some of Palm's plans for the Be assets. This second story is from OSOpinion, and is more speculation about a BeOS based 32-bit OS for Palm due in 2002.
Found these links through BeGroovy.
If only Be had released the source under the GPL prior to going under
Ummm, Be sold BeOS to Palm to gain $11,000,000, to pay off creditors and try to give some money back to the shareholders that poured a shitload of money into BEOS (for example, ME).
On top of that, for the upteenth million time, BeOS could NOT have been open-sourced, because it contained a lot of code that was not Be's to give away. Obviously they did not feel putting a ton of engineers on the task of preparing the source code to be given away.
How Slashdot has a big story on how one of MS's chief competitors lost a lawsuit, while places like MSNBC are running the story that XP lets pirates take over your entire computer?
Oh wait a minute.
I'd prefer it if they just wouldn't post anything about MS unless its related to Linux
Then I guess you'd be shocked to find out the percentage of people browsing this site via Windows, eh? Hint: It's larger than the percentage viewing it from Linux.
I love this kind of 'review.' Absolutely no spoilers, just an overall reaction to the film.
Why the hell would I want to read an in-depth review of a film that I am getting ready to go see? It's almost as bad as those trailers that give you a summary of the movie instead of a teaser...
It somtimes amazes me that politicians would pass up such an excellent opportunity to please the electorate at so little political cost to themselves - why not just ban spam?
Two words: Legal Bribery. A.k.a. "lobbying."
The posters mention of being on the "far side of the bell curve" raises an interesting question - how is Spam distributed? Obviously, it's not a bell curve; a significant number of people are getting as much Spam at the submitter, and a significant number of people are getting none. If 5% of "users" (do they mean user/person or user/address?) are getting as much Spam as the submitter, and everyone else is getting next to none, than Spam is not nearly as much of a problem as this article indicates.
Well first off, it's not the submitter you're quoting, but CmdrTaco. The reason he gets a lot of spam is either because he (a) runs a popular site that features his email address, and/or (b) subscribes to a lot of porn* sites.
I'll let you decide.
* Please note that I did not use the incredibly lame, old spelling, "pr0n."
WHO FUCKING CARES?
Fucking buy the console you like, play the fucking games you like, and be happy!
Merry fucking Christmas.
How can consumers be sure they're not just throttling what they used to give away for free and that what they're charging is fair?
What does it matter? They could charge $50 a month if they wanted. The question is quite simply: Do you feel it is worth it? If not, then don't pay it. If so, then pay it. Then Ximian will make marketing decisions based on the number of people that subscribe.
That's how capitalism works. You get to decide pricing indirectly, not directly!
Seriously, look at it [amdzone.com]. it looks like a very interesting product, with nice specs, but whos gonna buy it?
Oh I dunno, someone who like surfing the web from anywhere in and around their house, instead of being chained to their desk, or forced to sit uncomfortably with a hot laptop on their lap?
Don't get me wrong, this device looks like shit, but the idea sounds wonderful.
Er, I don't know about you, but most of the time, I am entering familiar filenames in familiar directory hierarchies (do you really spend the majority of your time in unknown territory?).
And, using MSWindows' braindead file selection dialog, it's equally slow, every time.
This is humorous, since you can just as easily type the name of the directories/files in a windows app's file selection dialog box, just as you would on the commandline. Better yet, autocompletion is available without having to hit TAB all the time!
Of course, if you spent as much time learning the tricks of the GUI as you do the CLI, you might already know this.
If you don't know they're names, then how do you know where you're supposed to be going?
Two scenarios.
First, let's say you're just browsing through your file system looking for something. Each time you expand the directory, you instantly see the ones below it, and with a simple click can expand the directory of your choice... ad infinitum. Way faster than typing the first few letters, hitting tab, typing 'ls' or 'dir' and ENTER, etc.
Second scenario, you know approximately where you want to get to, but the folder is buried deep. Click, click, click, click, click, click. You're there. With CLI, you're trying to remember the sequence of folder names to get where you want, much slower.
Some things you can do faster in CLI. Navigating a directory structure is not one of them.
Especially with win2000/XP automatic detection of USB devices it could be used as a effective delivery device for worm/virus packages to machines without or with protected email and Internet access.
FUD. Or please explain how exactly you are going to get it to execute anything when plugged in? When you plug this in, it's like plugging in a CF memory card. XP might ask you whether you want to download pictures/music off it, but other than that its harmless.
This guy is probably not even a member of Al Qaeda
If you read the article, you'd see they have some proof of his membership in al Qaeda. For example, he told them al Qaeda would soon hit the Indian parliament, and a couple days later terrorists attacked that parliament with guns and grenades.
Every time I see someone use a keyboard based navigation tool (Windows Commander comes to my mind, or bash completion), they're about ten times faster than click-move-click-move sequences.
This is absurd. Perhaps if they are navigating a tree of folders they are intimately familiar with, but I can navigate a tree or set of folders much quicker with a mouse then a CL and autocomplete. Especially if the folder names are unknown to me.