Not really. There's an antitrust law that prevents "underselling" to drive out competition, and once the competition is virtually extinct, you jack the price up. If MS all of the suddon started charging $40 (like it used to) for IE, then they would be in violation.
This is actually what happened. MS bundled IE into Windows to drive Netscape out of the market and to avoid having the web interface replace Windows. But IE cost a fortune to develop, so the price of the bundled product was substantially increased at a time when all other computer products were dropping in price. In the last decade MS has increased the street price of Windows upgrades by 300% and the OEM price by maybe 400-500%.
This is by far my favorite part: So it's not strictly true that I'm wealthy right now. I will be wealthy in six months, unless VA or the U.S. economy craters before then. I'll bet on VA; I'm not so sure about the U.S. economy:-).
Yep, no chance in hell VA Linux (er, software) will crater.
It's a tough industry, no denying it, probably the toughest there is. Gaming is probably the fastest-changing segment of the technology industry. The games we're playing today are nothing like the games from a decade ago. Real-time strategy, MMORPG, and first-person shooter games didn't exist in 1990. Today they dominate. Lots of company don't adapt to the changes and they die.
But lots of gaming companies are doing pretty well - Firaxis, Blizzard, id, Verant, Maxis, etc. There's been quite a bit of consolodiation, most of the names above are now subsidiaries of megacorps. Entertainment in general lends itself to consolidiation because sometimes even the best creators turn out flops so you need quite a few titles out at any time. On the whole, gaming companies have figured it out:
1) Use sane copy-protection features that don't seem horribly hostile to consumers. I can transfer my copy of Starcraft to any damn machine I please as long as I enter the key. I can copy the damned CD so I can not play from the original and avoid scratching it. This is not strong copy-protection, of course. I can probably share with some of my close friends, but game companies have figured out there's no way to prevent that without making their products anti-consumer. I won't buy a game that requires me to insert random disks at random times, say the magic incantion every third time I start up, and prostrate myself before the Gods of Copy Protection for the privelege of using their Glorious Content.
2) Charge reasonable prices. Games have stayed in the $30-70 price range for almost a decade. If prices rose as fast as CD and video prices did Black and White would cost $200. Piracy makes price discrimination quite difficult.
The EFF would lose it's nonprofit status if it started actively lobbying Congress. This happened to the Christian Coalition a few years back, which promptly spun off it's lobbying operation. Conservative activist organizations run into this problem quite a bit. They tend to split in half, with the original group staying out of direct lobbying, and the new group doing the lobbying. Ideally the EFF would do the same thing.
Damn. One of the things I liked about Mandrake 8.1 was that Quake 3 Arena played it, right out of the box. No downloading 20 different libaries and compiling them from scratch....
In addition to what's pointed out by others, MS promised (contractually) to deliver a fully functional Java VM. But the thing was broken in subtle and fatal ways that suggest some underhanded decisions. I did a little client-side java programming a year ago, and did the dev work on a Linux box. When I tested an app in Win98 and NT, I got a JVM error that one of the methods in the File class couldn't be found. This is like building an OS that's supposedly POSIX compliant, and just leaving out the stat(2) call. Needless to say, the only way to find which methods were unimplemented was to use them and then discover they don't exist.
Generally I'm on your side, but sometimes you gotta use "something" if you want to come down to a less abstract course.
I took several courses in operating systems. They used Solaris as a platform to illustrate concepts. Today Linux is popular for such classes because you go inside the OS and poke around... Rewrite the process scheduler, etc. I suppose Flash isn't a bad choice for learning the medium of electronic art.
This is why I like Mandrake for a desktop machine. Just because I can edit/etc/fstab myself doesn't mean I want to on my laptop. Server, yes, I'll tweak the filesystem settings to hell by hand. Laptop, no, mount the windows partition somewhere logical at statup.
It's funny, Aristotle thought of this over a few millenia ago. He even created a word for having your emotions validated by fiction - "catharthis".
IMHO, the active nature of gaming provides better catharthis than reading/watching/viewing something, which are entirely passive acts. I saw the original Blade when I was very stressed out and angry and came out the theater feeling quite calm and relaxed.
Of course, the opposite effect is possible. But I think this happens when you interact with a work that's "designed" to make people angry, like a movie that points out some injustice.
But you need a real-world story to make people angry about something in the real world. A movie about police abuses might make someone have a more negative opinion of police. A whole slew of works have been created that are termed "anti-war" or "jingoistic". (For another lesson in ancient aesthetic theory, this effect is Plato's reason for banning artists from the Republic.)
The most cathartic works tend to have the least resemblance to reality - Hamlet, the stock example in academic literature about catharthis, is set in a real country but describes completely fictious people and events. Games tend to take abstraction to the ultimate level, fantasy. It's difficult for me to hate the harmless Protoss across the street whose people slaughtered hundreds of Terrans yesterday. As a writer for Time put it after Columbine, the lesson of Doom is that evil floating red demons are evil and must be destroyed.
Yeah, I picked up the phone while somebody was using a modem. I didn't hear any of the webpage they were downloading, just noise. Random-sounding noise that always sounded random.
He finds out it doesn't work, so he shows his boss, who tells him to forget about it. So he goes and says, "Bill, this is broken. Who wrote this brain-dead piece of shit?"
Bill leaves, and his boss tells him, "Bill Gates wrote that brain-dead piece of shit, Martin."
On the programming side of the house, however, things are just the opposite - the Unix syscall interface, while not perfect, is limited in complexity. You can pick it up in a semester, no problem. The windows API is quite a beast. I can't imagine trying to do the practical component of a semester-long OS class using Windows (although I know someone who did).
My experience:
"Now that we've talked about process management, here are the fork(2), exec(2), and pipe(2) system calls. Go do your project (which involves some actual thought)." Someone else's experience:
"Now that we've talked about process management, here is the CreateProcess API. It takes 1,358 arguments as follows.... Oops, we're out of time."
No, my understanding is that the "malicious intent" standard only applies to public officials. Since the Supreme Court established this standard, elected or appointed official has won a defamation lawsuit, and no government employee has won without probving they should not be considered a "public official". The standards are also somewhat relaxed for "public figures" but that's a far fuzzier term.
My first question is: most of your comment is on the onus of/. to cross check references, but what liabilities are there on the original poster, i.e. for this posted story, the user dotslash? He/she was the one who submitted the story and wrote what we see in italics.
IANAL a lawyer but I have some indirect experience with libel. My predecessor at a job was fired for making false accusations about my boss. He wanted to sue for slander but since every statement she made had the form of "Joe told me Bob is a dope-smoking embezzling child molseter" she was off hook. She always said she was repeating someone else's allegations. (These people denied making the allegations in the first place.) Based on this, it is my understanding that you cannot commit libel/slander by proxy, but/. may be different. They add headlines, etc. and massively redistribute other people's libel. Maybe this is different.
Re:We Are Alone - Other Planets are Uninhabitable
on
42 Worlds in 32 Days
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· Score: 2
For example, the Earth was larger but due to a rare collision the Moon was split off. Multiple moons or no moon is inadequate. Our single moon, and its size create unique seasonal and environmental conditions. There are other rare occurances, which when multiplied together, make alien human life non existent in our Universe.
I can't see what the moon or number of moons has do with the formation of life. The moon has no effect on seasons, they are caused by the the earth's axis of rotation being nonperpendicular to it's orbital plane. Even then, I can't see why seasons are essential for the formation of life. Seasons result in environmental conditions that oscillate over time, so an organism in an environment with seasons has to adapt to a greater number of conditions. Seasons seem to be a hindrance to survival, not an aid. Human life began near the equator, in a "low season" part of the world.
FWIW, seasonal temperature and daylight changes are least extreme at the equator and most extreme at the poles. (People who move from, say, New York City to Miami often remark the days seen longer in the winter and shorter in the summer. Or vice-versa. Not too many other countries have a wide enough range of habitable latitudes to notice this effect.)
All-you-can-eat restaraunts, consumer-grade bandwith suppliers, and a lot of other folks do it and turn a profit. The first trick is to make sure that your flat rate exceeds the cost of the product consumed by the average user.
The other trick is to make sure your product has a pretty good diminishing return even for the most demanding people so you don't attract too many heavy users. I might eat more than my $8 worth of food at a buffet, but it will be very difficult for me to eat 2-3 times that amount. And I would need to be constantly using lots of bandwith to push my ISP out of the marginal profit range.
The advanatages of flat-rate pricing are obvious too: more appealing to consumers, higher profit margins since consumers are less efficient (econ theory-wise) than the provider, and a simpler payment process. It's just less of a hassle. The problem is that pricing these things, especially in a market with monopolistic competition (weblogs) is hard. You won't make anything if you charge nothing or $1,000. There's some optimal point where the supply and demand curve intersect, but this isn't an econ class, so the only way to find it is trial and error. And on the web, you can't just charge what everybody else charges, because they're not selling the exact same product to the exact same people. (ISPs are near-perfect susbstitutes for each other, that's why they all charge about the same amount.)
And it doesn't work if some people don't see the marginal utility of consuming more as negative - trolls, people who post 2000 comments, unemployed people who just read/. all day. You can only eat so much or consume so much bandwith surfing, but you can reload Slashdot a million times if you think it never gets old.
In the early 90s, I used AOL (please don't laugh) when they charged by the minute for acess to their glorified BBS and usenet. It just isn't fun to think about paying more a minute of leisure (or another page view), this is why almost entertainment is provided on a flat rate basis. I have a fast pipe and find the ads to be useful, but it would be annoying to think, "Look at that story and I'll use another pageview, and I've only got five left."
You have a point: there is a *correlation* between wealth and hard work in a capitalist society. But you're fooling yourself if you think that the two are locked together here.
I got a promotion last week. I now make almost twice as much money. It isn't because of anything good I did, it's because my boss didn't understand the meaning of "do that again and you're gone". I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Absent a boss who tried to pull a fast one, I wouldn't have had a opportunity like this for years, but I happened to be in the right place at the right time when someone had to take over now. Just pure luck. Of course, I could have had even better luck and been born rich....
My situation is quite similar to yours. My advice: look into the guard/reserves. A couple thoughts:
You may not end up doing what you want in the military. CS degrees present a real problem here. A poli sci major can spend a few years leading a platoon and sitting in a staff shop, decide the miltiary isn't his thing, and he still has a piece of paper that says he went to college (which is all a poli sci degree is). You may find yourself away from commercial technology for a while, and your degree depreciates fast if you don't use it.
Even today, the difference between what an O1 and young software engineer makes is pretty substantial. The difference between E2 and junior engineer pay is, umm, substantial. Money isn't everything, but it is something. The perks the military provides aren't nearly enough to compensate for the difference. Unlike doctors, lawyers, and pilots, techies are not paid extra. This obviously results in serious retention problems. (I laughed out loud at a recent announcement that the Signal Corps has a goal to improve its reelistment rate to the Army average. Perhaps that general would be interested in a bridge in brooklyn...)
Now that I've tried to dissuade you from active duty, consider the guard/reserve. You get much of the perks of active duty: tuition assistance for grad/prof school, management/leadership experience, a broader technical view, some free training which may/may not be useful and the military experience. For me at least, it's a win-win situation. You'll probably want to look into commissioning programs for college grads in any particular services since you're probably missed the boat on ROTC.
As to which service, I know that both the Air Force and the Army always need more technical people. (The Navy probably does too, but it is my duty to dissuade you from having anything to do with them.) The AF and Navy use more COTS(commercial of-the-shelf) technology than the Army, but we're picking up more new toys every year. As information tecnology starts percolating into lower levels and field units the Army may soon be a more high-tech organization than other services. The Army also has the advantage that it's fairly easy to get a non-active duty commission and you'll almost certainly be leading a platoon or running a fairly large staff shop as soon as you get done with training.
Very large and complex projects do get completed, sometimes even on-time/on-budget. Examples include skyscrapers, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, power plants (whether conventional or nuclear), oil refineries, B-747/A-320, etc. And all of these systems nowadays have a software component as well.
Software involves what I call "military-grade risk". Almost every military technology is delivered late, over budget, and without full functionality, no matter what the newspaper tells you (trust me). The national missile defense system is the greatest example, but any piece of military equipment more complicated than a rucksack always has problems at first. There are two reasons for this:
The military is far less risk-averse than corporations from a financial perspective. Cost overruns are a fact of life, as are initial problems.
The DOD wants things that are actually innovative because it needs new technology to "keep up". You don't get substantial improvements without taking substantial risks. Projects that the private sector would never consider paying to try are commonplace in the defense world.
Every piece of software is a military-style project - it's exceedingly complicated and usually nobody has built it before (or they don't have access to the previous designs). You want to try unproven technology, you'll get uneven results. The alternative, just staying with proven technology, has never been acceptable to the defense establishment, and is becoming less so to other sectors.
You make it sound like the Adminstration is the sole branch involved in antritrust cases. The DOJ brings a suit, but a judge has to find in favor of the government's case. That's why we have an independent judiciary, precisely so things like you describe are prevented to greatest extent possible.
Jackson is a Reagan appointee who has been described as violently pro-business. MS couldn't have gotten a more sympathetic judge under any circumstances. Unfortunately for Microsoft, anybody who spends a year listening to an explanation of their "business practices" would find them guilty, original prejudices aside. It didn't help when Microsoft, used to bullying competitors and ignoring what the market told them, used the same practices with a federal judge. FUD like "You can't possibly remove IE from Windows" may work in press releases, but it is a miserable failure in legal briefs. Did I mention Ronald Reagan, the late 20th century's most conservative political leader, appointed the judge who called Microsoft a criminal cartel??
Microsoft, having realized they couldn't bully the judiciary, started making contributions, you're right. I don't think a company being investigated for these charges should be allowed to make campaign contributions, but that's the nature of the game. Politicians aren't allowed to accept contributions from racketeers or drug dealers or pimps in exchange for overlooking criminal behavior. Apparently companies hell-bent on destroying their competition and gouging customers instead of competing are a different story.
And while we're at it, let's stop investigating the mob's protection rackets - any business is good for the economy now, even if its illegal, predatory, and actually destroys more than it creates.
What's amazing is that a even Reagan-appointed judge had the blunt honesty to call this company what it is, a thuggish criminal enterprise, and somehow our government isn't going to punish them. If anyone else caused the economic harm this company had, was found guilty of all counts except one, would the Ashcroft DOJ not appeal a sentence?
What would a Mozilla user (or strictly speaking, beta tester) want to browse MSN for? Fair question, no?
Just wait, it's just the begining. They might work in a heterogenous environment and need something from Microsoft. They might not be total zealots. The list goes on. Hotmail and MSDN will soon follow.
I used to enjoy occasionally reading Salon. Then they started doing this "Salon Premium" crap - some of the stories would be avaliable only if you subscribed.
This seemed all fine and good, cause for a couple days about 20% of stories were flagged "Premium" and I was considering a subscription. All of a sudden, every article worth reading became "premium". And I wasn't supposed to notice? Result: potential subscriber got horribly pissed off. Now you don't get my $30 or even the ad revenue I'd generate.
Slashdot is going about this the right way: be aboveboard, keep content free, and hopefully make the price for a subscription reasonable given the previous price - $0 to $30 is a big jump, $0 to $5 isn't so much.
Is anyone else driven beserk by some of the analogies used? This guy is comparing the deaths of over 5,000 people to some computer downtime? Is there anybody unwilling to exploit the WTC tragedy in a despicable manner>BR>
And this one really makes me mad: the Gartner group telling people to switch to IIS is "giving in to terrorist" - like riding Greyhound instead of flying United. This guy argues switching webservers (a change in product) is equivalent to switching to a totally different mode of doing business. What a terrible analogy. Better analogy: One airline lets armed wackos onto planes, the other one won't. You should fly airline number two, since the hijackers will most likely fly airline number one. Using Apache is no more "giving in to terrorists" than demanding new airline security measures - it is a prudent response to bad people.
And what is this nonsense about "we're gonna find all the buffer overflows"???? You claim your product is secure, it's been on the market for years, and now it's time to find buffer overflows?
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. There's an antitrust law that prevents "underselling" to drive out competition, and once the competition is virtually extinct, you jack the price up. If MS all of the suddon started charging $40 (like it used to) for IE, then they would be in violation.
This is actually what happened. MS bundled IE into Windows to drive Netscape out of the market and to avoid having the web interface replace Windows. But IE cost a fortune to develop, so the price of the bundled product was substantially increased at a time when all other computer products were dropping in price. In the last decade MS has increased the street price of Windows upgrades by 300% and the OEM price by maybe 400-500%.
This is by far my favorite part:
:-).
So it's not strictly true that I'm wealthy right now. I will be wealthy in six months, unless VA or the U.S. economy craters before then. I'll bet on
VA; I'm not so sure about the U.S. economy
Yep, no chance in hell VA Linux (er, software) will crater.
It's a tough industry, no denying it, probably the toughest there is. Gaming is probably the fastest-changing segment of the technology industry. The games we're playing today are nothing like the games from a decade ago. Real-time strategy, MMORPG, and first-person shooter games didn't exist in 1990. Today they dominate. Lots of company don't adapt to the changes and they die.
But lots of gaming companies are doing pretty well - Firaxis, Blizzard, id, Verant, Maxis, etc. There's been quite a bit of consolodiation, most of the names above are now subsidiaries of megacorps. Entertainment in general lends itself to consolidiation because sometimes even the best creators turn out flops so you need quite a few titles out at any time. On the whole, gaming companies have figured it out:
1) Use sane copy-protection features that don't seem horribly hostile to consumers. I can transfer my copy of Starcraft to any damn machine I please as long as I enter the key. I can copy the damned CD so I can not play from the original and avoid scratching it. This is not strong copy-protection, of course. I can probably share with some of my close friends, but game companies have figured out there's no way to prevent that without making their products anti-consumer. I won't buy a game that requires me to insert random disks at random times, say the magic incantion every third time I start up, and prostrate myself before the Gods of Copy Protection for the privelege of using their Glorious Content.
2) Charge reasonable prices. Games have stayed in the $30-70 price range for almost a decade. If prices rose as fast as CD and video prices did Black and White would cost $200. Piracy makes price discrimination quite difficult.
The EFF would lose it's nonprofit status if it started actively lobbying Congress. This happened to the Christian Coalition a few years back, which promptly spun off it's lobbying operation. Conservative activist organizations run into this problem quite a bit. They tend to split in half, with the original group staying out of direct lobbying, and the new group doing the lobbying. Ideally the EFF would do the same thing.
Damn. One of the things I liked about Mandrake 8.1 was that Quake 3 Arena played it, right out of the box. No downloading 20 different libaries and compiling them from scratch....
In addition to what's pointed out by others, MS promised (contractually) to deliver a fully functional Java VM. But the thing was broken in subtle and fatal ways that suggest some underhanded decisions. I did a little client-side java programming a year ago, and did the dev work on a Linux box. When I tested an app in Win98 and NT, I got a JVM error that one of the methods in the File class couldn't be found. This is like building an OS that's supposedly POSIX compliant, and just leaving out the stat(2) call. Needless to say, the only way to find which methods were unimplemented was to use them and then discover they don't exist.
Generally I'm on your side, but sometimes you gotta use "something" if you want to come down to a less abstract course.
I took several courses in operating systems. They used Solaris as a platform to illustrate concepts. Today Linux is popular for such classes because you go inside the OS and poke around... Rewrite the process scheduler, etc. I suppose Flash isn't a bad choice for learning the medium of electronic art.
Amen.
/etc/fstab myself doesn't mean I want to on my laptop. Server, yes, I'll tweak the filesystem settings to hell by hand. Laptop, no, mount the windows partition somewhere logical at statup.
This is why I like Mandrake for a desktop machine. Just because I can edit
It's funny, Aristotle thought of this over a few millenia ago. He even created a word for having your emotions validated by fiction - "catharthis".
IMHO, the active nature of gaming provides better catharthis than reading/watching/viewing something, which are entirely passive acts. I saw the original Blade when I was very stressed out and angry and came out the theater feeling quite calm and relaxed.
Of course, the opposite effect is possible. But I think this happens when you interact with a work that's "designed" to make people angry, like a movie that points out some injustice.
But you need a real-world story to make people angry about something in the real world. A movie about police abuses might make someone have a more negative opinion of police. A whole slew of works have been created that are termed "anti-war" or "jingoistic". (For another lesson in ancient aesthetic theory, this effect is Plato's reason for banning artists from the Republic.)
The most cathartic works tend to have the least resemblance to reality - Hamlet, the stock example in academic literature about catharthis, is set in a real country but describes completely fictious people and events. Games tend to take abstraction to the ultimate level, fantasy. It's difficult for me to hate the harmless Protoss across the street whose people slaughtered hundreds of Terrans yesterday. As a writer for Time put it after Columbine, the lesson of Doom is that evil floating red demons are evil and must be destroyed.
Yeah, I picked up the phone while somebody was using a modem. I didn't hear any of the webpage they were downloading, just noise. Random-sounding noise that always sounded random.
In his book, Barbarians led by Bill Gates , Martin Eller relates the tale of the fill function in MS BASIC.
He finds out it doesn't work, so he shows his boss, who tells him to forget about it. So he goes and says, "Bill, this is broken. Who wrote this brain-dead piece of shit?"
Bill leaves, and his boss tells him, "Bill Gates wrote that brain-dead piece of shit, Martin."
Maybe.
On the programming side of the house, however, things are just the opposite - the Unix syscall interface, while not perfect, is limited in complexity. You can pick it up in a semester, no problem. The windows API is quite a beast. I can't imagine trying to do the practical component of a semester-long OS class using Windows (although I know someone who did).
My experience:
"Now that we've talked about process management, here are the fork(2), exec(2), and pipe(2) system calls. Go do your project (which involves some actual thought)."
Someone else's experience:
"Now that we've talked about process management, here is the CreateProcess API. It takes 1,358 arguments as follows.... Oops, we're out of time."
No, my understanding is that the "malicious intent" standard only applies to public officials. Since the Supreme Court established this standard, elected or appointed official has won a defamation lawsuit, and no government employee has won without probving they should not be considered a "public official". The standards are also somewhat relaxed for "public figures" but that's a far fuzzier term.
My first question is: most of your comment is on the onus of /. to cross check references, but what liabilities are there on the original poster, i.e. for this posted story, the user dotslash? He/she was the one who submitted the story and wrote what we see in italics.
/. may be different. They add headlines, etc. and massively redistribute other people's libel. Maybe this is different.
IANAL a lawyer but I have some indirect experience with libel. My predecessor at a job was fired for making false accusations about my boss. He wanted to sue for slander but since every statement she made had the form of "Joe told me Bob is a dope-smoking embezzling child molseter" she was off hook. She always said she was repeating someone else's allegations. (These people denied making the allegations in the first place.) Based on this, it is my understanding that you cannot commit libel/slander by proxy, but
For example, the Earth was larger but due to a rare collision the Moon was split off. Multiple moons or no moon is inadequate. Our single moon, and its size create unique seasonal and environmental conditions. There are other rare occurances, which when multiplied together, make alien human life non existent in our Universe.
I can't see what the moon or number of moons has do with the formation of life. The moon has no effect on seasons, they are caused by the the earth's axis of rotation being nonperpendicular to it's orbital plane. Even then, I can't see why seasons are essential for the formation of life. Seasons result in environmental conditions that oscillate over time, so an organism in an environment with seasons has to adapt to a greater number of conditions. Seasons seem to be a hindrance to survival, not an aid. Human life began near the equator, in a "low season" part of the world.
FWIW, seasonal temperature and daylight changes are least extreme at the equator and most extreme at the poles. (People who move from, say, New York City to Miami often remark the days seen longer in the winter and shorter in the summer. Or vice-versa. Not too many other countries have a wide enough range of habitable latitudes to notice this effect.)
Sure you can.
/. all day. You can only eat so much or consume so much bandwith surfing, but you can reload Slashdot a million times if you think it never gets old.
All-you-can-eat restaraunts, consumer-grade bandwith suppliers, and a lot of other folks do it and turn a profit. The first trick is to make sure that your flat rate exceeds the cost of the product consumed by the average user.
The other trick is to make sure your product has a pretty good diminishing return even for the most demanding people so you don't attract too many heavy users. I might eat more than my $8 worth of food at a buffet, but it will be very difficult for me to eat 2-3 times that amount. And I would need to be constantly using lots of bandwith to push my ISP out of the marginal profit range.
The advanatages of flat-rate pricing are obvious too: more appealing to consumers, higher profit margins since consumers are less efficient (econ theory-wise) than the provider, and a simpler payment process. It's just less of a hassle. The problem is that pricing these things, especially in a market with monopolistic competition (weblogs) is hard. You won't make anything if you charge nothing or $1,000. There's some optimal point where the supply and demand curve intersect, but this isn't an econ class, so the only way to find it is trial and error. And on the web, you can't just charge what everybody else charges, because they're not selling the exact same product to the exact same people. (ISPs are near-perfect susbstitutes for each other, that's why they all charge about the same amount.)
And it doesn't work if some people don't see the marginal utility of consuming more as negative - trolls, people who post 2000 comments, unemployed people who just read
In the early 90s, I used AOL (please don't laugh) when they charged by the minute for acess to their glorified BBS and usenet. It just isn't fun to think about paying more a minute of leisure (or another page view), this is why almost entertainment is provided on a flat rate basis. I have a fast pipe and find the ads to be useful, but it would be annoying to think, "Look at that story and I'll use another pageview, and I've only got five left."
You have a point: there is a *correlation* between wealth and hard work in a capitalist society. But you're fooling yourself if you think that the two are locked together here.
I got a promotion last week. I now make almost twice as much money. It isn't because of anything good I did, it's because my boss didn't understand the meaning of "do that again and you're gone". I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Absent a boss who tried to pull a fast one, I wouldn't have had a opportunity like this for years, but I happened to be in the right place at the right time when someone had to take over now. Just pure luck. Of course, I could have had even better luck and been born rich....
Now that I've tried to dissuade you from active duty, consider the guard/reserve. You get much of the perks of active duty: tuition assistance for grad/prof school, management/leadership experience, a broader technical view, some free training which may/may not be useful and the military experience. For me at least, it's a win-win situation. You'll probably want to look into commissioning programs for college grads in any particular services since you're probably missed the boat on ROTC.
As to which service, I know that both the Air Force and the Army always need more technical people. (The Navy probably does too, but it is my duty to dissuade you from having anything to do with them.) The AF and Navy use more COTS(commercial of-the-shelf) technology than the Army, but we're picking up more new toys every year. As information tecnology starts percolating into lower levels and field units the Army may soon be a more high-tech organization than other services. The Army also has the advantage that it's fairly easy to get a non-active duty commission and you'll almost certainly be leading a platoon or running a fairly large staff shop as soon as you get done with training.
Software involves what I call "military-grade risk". Almost every military technology is delivered late, over budget, and without full functionality, no matter what the newspaper tells you (trust me). The national missile defense system is the greatest example, but any piece of military equipment more complicated than a rucksack always has problems at first. There are two reasons for this:
Every piece of software is a military-style project - it's exceedingly complicated and usually nobody has built it before (or they don't have access to the previous designs). You want to try unproven technology, you'll get uneven results. The alternative, just staying with proven technology, has never been acceptable to the defense establishment, and is becoming less so to other sectors.
You make it sound like the Adminstration is the sole branch involved in antritrust cases. The DOJ brings a suit, but a judge has to find in favor of the government's case. That's why we have an independent judiciary, precisely so things like you describe are prevented to greatest extent possible.
Jackson is a Reagan appointee who has been described as violently pro-business. MS couldn't have gotten a more sympathetic judge under any circumstances. Unfortunately for Microsoft, anybody who spends a year listening to an explanation of their "business practices" would find them guilty, original prejudices aside. It didn't help when Microsoft, used to bullying competitors and ignoring what the market told them, used the same practices with a federal judge. FUD like "You can't possibly remove IE from Windows" may work in press releases, but it is a miserable failure in legal briefs. Did I mention Ronald Reagan, the late 20th century's most conservative political leader, appointed the judge who called Microsoft a criminal cartel??
Microsoft, having realized they couldn't bully the judiciary, started making contributions, you're right. I don't think a company being investigated for these charges should be allowed to make campaign contributions, but that's the nature of the game. Politicians aren't allowed to accept contributions from racketeers or drug dealers or pimps in exchange for overlooking criminal behavior. Apparently companies hell-bent on destroying their competition and gouging customers instead of competing are a different story.
And while we're at it, let's stop investigating the mob's protection rackets - any business is good for the economy now, even if its illegal, predatory, and actually destroys more than it creates.
What's amazing is that a even Reagan-appointed judge had the blunt honesty to call this company what it is, a thuggish criminal enterprise, and somehow our government isn't going to punish them. If anyone else caused the economic harm this company had, was found guilty of all counts except one, would the Ashcroft DOJ not appeal a sentence?
I'm at a loss for words.
The DMCA is pretty clear that 1) applies to copy control mechinisms only and 2) Reverse engineering for the sake of interoperability is still legal
Tell that to the LiVid guys.
What would a Mozilla user (or strictly speaking, beta tester) want to browse MSN for? Fair question, no?
Just wait, it's just the begining. They might work in a heterogenous environment and need something from Microsoft. They might not be total zealots. The list goes on. Hotmail and MSDN will soon follow.
I used to enjoy occasionally reading Salon. Then they started doing this "Salon Premium" crap - some of the stories would be avaliable only if you subscribed.
This seemed all fine and good, cause for a couple days about 20% of stories were flagged "Premium" and I was considering a subscription. All of a sudden, every article worth reading became "premium". And I wasn't supposed to notice? Result: potential subscriber got horribly pissed off. Now you don't get my $30 or even the ad revenue I'd generate.
Slashdot is going about this the right way: be aboveboard, keep content free, and hopefully make the price for a subscription reasonable given the previous price - $0 to $30 is a big jump, $0 to $5 isn't so much.
Is anyone else driven beserk by some of the analogies used? This guy is comparing the deaths of over 5,000 people to some computer downtime? Is there anybody unwilling to exploit the WTC tragedy in a despicable manner>BR>
And this one really makes me mad: the Gartner group telling people to switch to IIS is "giving in to terrorist" - like riding Greyhound instead of flying United. This guy argues switching webservers (a change in product) is equivalent to switching to a totally different mode of doing business. What a terrible analogy. Better analogy: One airline lets armed wackos onto planes, the other one won't. You should fly airline number two, since the hijackers will most likely fly airline number one. Using Apache is no more "giving in to terrorists" than demanding new airline security measures - it is a prudent response to bad people.
And what is this nonsense about "we're gonna find all the buffer overflows"???? You claim your product is secure, it's been on the market for years, and now it's time to find buffer overflows?