Would Transmeta get all this hoopla if Linus didn't work there?
I am pretty certain they wouldn't get as much hoopla here if Linus didn't work there. Linus could run a company selling gas chambers to neo-Nazi groups and the crowd here would be talking up how the code determining gas mixtures was open-source.
"By this time next year, it could equal the notebook market," Mark Allen, Transmeta's CEO, said of the company's prospects in the market for embedded chips.
I wonder here whether he was talking about the notebook market for Transmeta's chips or whether about the notebook market at large. Note also here that their entrance into this market really amounts to nothing more substantial than 'marketing to' makers of equipment that uses embedded chips. When Transmeta first started trading there was so much buzz around it that the marketing seemed plausible. Now, after a precipitous drop in share price (yes, I own TMTA), and numerous fallen-through-supposed-deals with computer companies, and TMTA looking like it might be delisted in 6 months, this kind of hyperbole makes me suspicious. Why, if this market is going to be so huge, was TMTA *not* marketing to these guys in the first place ? What's wrong with their leadership that they did not initially target a market that seems like it fits TMTA so much better ?
Second, this article makes me wonder if Slashdot will consider inserting text ads like Google by masquerading as submissions. I think it is a great way to get income to maintain this heavyly used site (banners at the top are no longer very effective), given the financial conditions of the parent company VA Linux.
What's so special about this article in particular that made you start suspecting this ? The situation you propose is already here: the book reviews already look very much like text ads, very very big text ads that come with very large endorsements from -presumably- unbiased reviewers and that come complete with hyperlinks to buy product. From this admittedly jaded perspective it comes as little surprise that 1) the majority of book reviews are very positive; anyone who reads many tech books would be suspicious at this alone, 2) a suspiciously large number of them seem to be published by O'Reilly, who as I recall run banner ads here.
To say that child porn causes people to molest children is like saying that gay porn causes people to be gay or straight porn causes one to be straight. It just doesn't work that way, because you're mistaking cause for effect.
You are making an empirical statement which, as far as I know, there is no basis for making. Are you completely dismissing out of hand the possibility that exposing people to gay pornography can *not* encourage people to engage in homosexual behavior ? Are you arguing that the causes of homosexual behavior are 100% genetic, subject to no environmental influence whatsoever ? If so, please refer us to the studies which systematically exposed young people to differing amounts of gay pornography and tracked their sexual preferences forward. And if so, how would explain the wide discrepancy in frequency of homosexual behavior in many societies today (I believe in at least one African tribe young boys show significant damage to their palates because their tribe dictates that older men freely receive fellatio from them) and in years past (think ancient Greece) ? Do you attribute these differences to genetic aberrations (and I use this term in the purely statistical sense) ?
Just because one may *want* differences like these to be genetic does not mean they are. Open-mindedness demands that people consider the evidence and at least consider the possibility that competing, potentially less palatable hypotheses are true.
Fire their asses. I know lots of dumbfuk secretaries who used to do just fine running their applications from a DOS prompt. Ditto for clerks
working from a VMS prompt. Anyone who can't deal with the spiffy new Linux desktops is suffering from a bad case of dont-want-to.
And if you looked carefully you would find these 'dumbfucks' (note the spelling) had probably been using DOS or VMS from the old days, and that it probably took them a long time to get their training (however they got it). You would also find that if you tried to convert a modern office *back* to DOS or VMS you would find plumetting productivity and resistance to change. So would you recommend people being fired in this case, as well ? Does difficulty in training users nowadays in DOS/VMS somehow make the latter a better choice ?
Then, of course, there are all the associated costs involved with firing these employees: severance packages, hiring new Linux-savvy ones or training new ones in Linux (recalling that the latter was hard to do for the company in the first place), transition costs including lost productivity during interim training, etc, and you will probably find firing these employees is not a viable solution.
Just because you think Linux is easy to use does not make it so.
I'm not really sure if this use constitutes what one would normally consider a 'desktop'. The issues you would consider for specialized, turn-key applications are quite different that the issues you would consider for picking a desktop for the everyday user. There are tons of ATMs and POS machines out there that run OS/2, and some are probably still being deployed, but I doubt many today or then would still recommend OS/2 for the desktop (and I was a rabid OS/2 fan).
If your bank requires IE, maybe you should consider a new bank? I mean that may seem drastic, but if they are uncapable of supporting the system your business wants to use, I'm sure another bank would be happy to hold on to your money.
I think it would be silly to change your bank simply because your OS doesn't support it. Imagine there was some bank out there whose website did not render properly on IE - how silly would an MS zealot look if he suggested affected companies change their banks ? ? How loud would that zealot get shouted down here ?
The choice of an OS should not determine a company's policies elsewhere.
And I would bet that the original poster's company spent some time training their employees, and their failure to get comfortable with Linux reflects both the reality of the state of the Linux desktop and the level of comfort people have with the MS desktop, rather than the lack of adequacy of training. Just this weekend I installed Mandrake 8.1 and spent way too much time 1) figuring out how to move the Windows95-style taskbar from the left side to the bottom, and 2) figuring out how to change the layout of said task bar. Things like that should not be that difficult.
I used to teach at a major university. If students are not paying attention to what's happening at the front of the class, I would much prefer they leave and go elsewhere. This is not so much because I care about what they are doing to themselves, but that I care about what they are doing to others who *are* interested: Students reading a paper or sleeping are distracting to the instructor and (worse) they are distracting to other students. If students were surfing the Net they would be even more disruptive. Should instructors and the class need to worry about someone hitting a webpage that plays music in his class ? Should the university worry about possible lawsuits stemming from students viewing pornography (inadvertently or otherwise) and offending others?
Teachers commonly prohibit behaviour like chewing gum and talking in class and can throw students out for doing so precisely because this behaviour can disturb the class. So why in these cases are civil liberties people not running around crying about abridgements of freedom of speech ? Because even they understand such activity is only detrimental to everyone involved.
A little sanity and a little less arm-waving, please.
While we're at it let's get rid of all the posts about the virtues of the GPL, and all the posts about the evils of Microsoft. Also let's get rid of all the posts about why patents are bad, as well as the posts about why the RIAA and MPAA are bad and infringing on our libterties. After all, it has been said a million times, and it's true, but it's not news to anyone. If you have actual insightful comments, make them.
What about employee loyalty ?
on
Morals and Layoffs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I found this post ironic because in the last few years many tech workers have enjoyed an ability to switch from job to job, garnering raises and promotions on the way. Employee mobility, especially in the tech sector, has been higher in the last 3-4 years than it probably has ever been. This, I would expect most readers here would agree, is a Good Thing.
But I wonder, don't "job security" and "employee loyalty" go hand in hand ? Sure, employees will be more loyal to companies that offer the kinds of perks Katz talks about, but aren't companies also more likely offer those kinds of perks if they had some reason to believe their employees would show them loyalty ? How, in this time of unprecedented worker mobility, can we fairly expect companies to extend things like 3-6 months termination notice when companies probably would be derided for expecting 3-6 months of notice when one of their employees decided to leave for greener pastures ?
In short, what kind of responsibilities ought we have to our employers ? Is it reasonable to expect that companies should be any less self-interested than we workers are ?
as I understood it companies are structured to protect the shareholders and executives from the creditors of the company
Sorry, what I meant was that the shareholders and executives were protected from legal action by the creditors, such as I imagined the original poster to be seeking. i.e., the executives and shareholders are not *personally* liable for any debt undertaken by the company and could not be sued.
Yet, the fact that the companies had the employees work basically for free without, you know, saying "Hey, it's highly unlikely that you'll ever see the pay for that" doesn't make you sick at all?
It doesn't make me sick. I sympathize with the employees, and they should do all they can *within the law* to seek remedy, but this is the way business works. *Individuals* declare bankruptcy all the time, leaving their creditors out to dry; does that make you sick ? Would you argue it was OK for the creditors to sneak into their house and steal the individual's belongings ?
When I worked for a dot-com-wannabe years ago, I had a problem with a pay check that kept bouncing. For a few days management was explaining this as being due to various sundry problems that were all, of course, the bank's fault. Finally I walked into the CEO's office and told him that I needed my money and that if I didn't receive it there would be a problem. We both understood this to mean I would not work anymore until I was paid what I was owed. I received a personal check the next day. My point is, I can't feel *too much* sympathy for employees who let their company get too far in arrears.
And as for your own justification of the theivery, I have a hard time imagining that any of these employees were *quite* stupid enough to be owed so much money that they could 'justify' stealing some of the larger-ticket items described in the article.
Does anybody know what recourse there is for people like me to get the money owed them?
You go after them in bankruptcy court. Michael's intimation that somehow the employees' theivery is justified in these situations is just so stupid it makes me sick.
As for whether or not you can go after the assets of the CEOs, I believe you cannot. IANAL, but as I understood it companies are structured to protect the shareholders and executives from the creditors of the company. Now, if some of them were personally negligent, this might be different, but problems arising from their actions as executives of the company are probably not actionable.
So you don't like the terms that attach to FrontPage ? Simple, DON'T USE IT AND RETURN THE PRODUCT. After all, this is what everyone who objects to the (equally dubious) clauses of the GPL are told, isn't it ? Why is one set of restrictive conditions being vilified while another set of restrictive conditions sanctified ? Certainly in both cases consumers and users have plenty of choices available.
It might seem silly to blame Boeing or the construction engineers, but would it be silly to blame the airlines and airports that set the security policies that allowed people to slip onto planes with apparently innocuous items turned into deadly weapons ? Would it be silly to criticize the design of airplanes that allow easy access to the cockpit, or the design of cockpit doors which are easily breached ? Would it be silly to criticize the people who set immigration policies allowing some of these people to enter the U.S., Canada, and other countries on sometimes tenuous grounds ? Is it silly to question the engineering designs that allow a plane to be crashed into a building ?
If these things are not all silly, why not question whether or not a tool like PGP might have helped facilitate the attacks ? *If* it turned out that PGP-encrypted communication was intercepted by the FBI or NSA, but could not be decrypted in time, would that be irrelevant ? Would wondering about cryptography and what we want to allow be so silly then ?
While I was struck by the mundaneness of the Sims, and never *really* liked the game, right after I got it I spent way too many hours in a weekend playing it (I was determined to see how far I could progress in the military). Then I took a break from the game, started taking a shower and I swear I could see my hygiene and comfort levels rising from red to green. That's when I knew I had to stop playing it.
I don't question the usefulness. I *do* question how judicious the doctors were in performing the demonstration. This procedure was almost certainly not a life-or-death one that could only be performed by specific doctors in the U.S. So performing it in this fashion *must* have exposed this patient to some risks, even if there were qualified doctors on the patient's side of the ocean overseeing the work, else this story would not be newsworthy. The doctors therefore exposed a patient to some risk just for a proof-of-concept, a publication, and a lot of P.R., when the proof-of-concept could have been done by operating on a pig, or just demonstrating the requisite dexterity in some other fashion. I guess this is just another case where the vanity of surgeons conflicted and overrode the safety and interest of the patient involved. What would the press release have looked like if the patient had died, I wonder.
You can never go back. I fear all this project will do is demonstrate the reality isn't a match for my memory of the past.
Amen. On the Apple II I *loved* the game Wizardry. That game was so far ahead of its time. However, I'm (just) smart enough to realize that no manner of updating the engine/graphics/etc is going to bring this game up-to-snuff with modern games designed from the ground up with today's technology, unless the whole game is reworked. And if the latter, what's the point ? To me, this is just like the colorization of all those old movie classics that Ted Turner was - rightly - so roundly criticized for - it just tarnishes what was once golden.
why shouldn't municipalities take it upon themselves to deliver service for their constituents?"
They shouldn't do this for the same reason they shouldn't be installing cable tv services, or telephone services, cell phone networks, or movie theaters: these are non-essential services which the private sector is willing and able to provide, and which governments have little experience or expertise with. The only thing governments should be providing for us are public goods which the private sector cannot or will not provide us.
Further, I have little confidence in the ability of a municipal or other government to provide efficient, inexpensive Internet (or other) services, and I can think of many more things I would rather have them provide or improve. If the government really feels a need to provide their citizens with connectivity I think it is best done with a limited number of Internet kiosks at places like libraries, city halls, etc, but I would vote against anybody who would suggest that providing more than this is the job of our government.
Plus, no business would dare register under one of the new TLDs unless they owned the.com version. It's guaranteed they'd face a lawsuit from the.com owner, and we all know in these cases the money always wins.
I think this is the biggest reason why these and most subsequent domains are going to be mostly undesirable. The threat of litigation, combined with the fact that most 'good' domains (sans tld suffix) are gone, conspire to make protecting yourself from a cyber-squatter the only good reason to get a (.biz,.info, etc) domain.
I find it amazing to think that a book about the supposed virtues of OSS - especially in a business setting - should bring up the browser war issue. As far as I'm concerned, the open-sourcing of Netscape and the Mozilla project points to nearly everything that can be wrong with an OSS approach - look how long it has taken to bring something to the desktop that is remotely useable, for instance. One might have expected that if OSS were all it is sometimes said to be we might have had useable product a year or more ago. Now, somehow I expect that this book touches little on Mozilla's considerable problems (while presumably talking up the failures of non-OSS Netscape), so I have to wonder how convincing an informed reader will find (at least this portion) of the book's argument ?
Sure, there are OSS successes, but I can't believe the author makes a definitive argument for OSS in business as a core part of a company's business plan - there are just too few examples of real solid successes and fewer still of money-making, solvent OSS-based companies.
Am I missing something ? How can a language 'support' another language (I assume this means relatively full support), support other languages, and yet still be faster than *any* of the languages ? The only thing I can imagine is that their compilers are better, but somehow I doubt that's the answer.
Re:So why then is Slashdot always down ?
on
Handling the Loads
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· Score: 2
I think we may also be underestimating how dynamic CNN etc's web pages may be. It is clear, for instance, that pages are customized to some extent by broad geographical region. They have seem to display random user's comments in several sections. There is probably other dynamism going on there, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Would Transmeta get all this hoopla if Linus didn't work there?
I am pretty certain they wouldn't get as much hoopla here if Linus didn't work there. Linus could run a company selling gas chambers to neo-Nazi groups and the crowd here would be talking up how the code determining gas mixtures was open-source.
"By this time next year, it could equal the notebook market," Mark Allen, Transmeta's CEO, said of the company's prospects in the market for embedded chips.
I wonder here whether he was talking about the notebook market for Transmeta's chips or whether about the notebook market at large. Note also here that their entrance into this market really amounts to nothing more substantial than 'marketing to' makers of equipment that uses embedded chips. When Transmeta first started trading there was so much buzz around it that the marketing seemed plausible. Now, after a precipitous drop in share price (yes, I own TMTA), and numerous fallen-through-supposed-deals with computer companies, and TMTA looking like it might be delisted in 6 months, this kind of hyperbole makes me suspicious. Why, if this market is going to be so huge, was TMTA *not* marketing to these guys in the first place ? What's wrong with their leadership that they did not initially target a market that seems like it fits TMTA so much better ?
Second, this article makes me wonder if Slashdot will consider inserting text ads like Google by masquerading as submissions. I think it is a great way to get income to maintain this heavyly used site (banners at the top are no longer very effective), given the financial conditions of the parent company VA Linux.
What's so special about this article in particular that made you start suspecting this ? The situation you propose is already here: the book reviews already look very much like text ads, very very big text ads that come with very large endorsements from -presumably- unbiased reviewers and that come complete with hyperlinks to buy product. From this admittedly jaded perspective it comes as little surprise that 1) the majority of book reviews are very positive; anyone who reads many tech books would be suspicious at this alone, 2) a suspiciously large number of them seem to be published by O'Reilly, who as I recall run banner ads here.
To say that child porn causes people to molest children is like saying that gay porn causes people to be gay or straight porn causes one to be straight. It just doesn't work that way, because you're mistaking cause for effect.
You are making an empirical statement which, as far as I know, there is no basis for making. Are you completely dismissing out of hand the possibility that exposing people to gay pornography can *not* encourage people to engage in homosexual behavior ? Are you arguing that the causes of homosexual behavior are 100% genetic, subject to no environmental influence whatsoever ? If so, please refer us to the studies which systematically exposed young people to differing amounts of gay pornography and tracked their sexual preferences forward. And if so, how would explain the wide discrepancy in frequency of homosexual behavior in many societies today (I believe in at least one African tribe young boys show significant damage to their palates because their tribe dictates that older men freely receive fellatio from them) and in years past (think ancient Greece) ? Do you attribute these differences to genetic aberrations (and I use this term in the purely statistical sense) ?
Just because one may *want* differences like these to be genetic does not mean they are. Open-mindedness demands that people consider the evidence and at least consider the possibility that competing, potentially less palatable hypotheses are true.
Fire their asses. I know lots of dumbfuk secretaries who used to do just fine running their applications from a DOS prompt. Ditto for clerks
working from a VMS prompt. Anyone who can't deal with the spiffy new Linux desktops is suffering from a bad case of dont-want-to.
And if you looked carefully you would find these 'dumbfucks' (note the spelling) had probably been using DOS or VMS from the old days, and that it probably took them a long time to get their training (however they got it). You would also find that if you tried to convert a modern office *back* to DOS or VMS you would find plumetting productivity and resistance to change. So would you recommend people being fired in this case, as well ? Does difficulty in training users nowadays in DOS/VMS somehow make the latter a better choice ?
Then, of course, there are all the associated costs involved with firing these employees: severance packages, hiring new Linux-savvy ones or training new ones in Linux (recalling that the latter was hard to do for the company in the first place), transition costs including lost productivity during interim training, etc, and you will probably find firing these employees is not a viable solution.
Just because you think Linux is easy to use does not make it so.
I'm not really sure if this use constitutes what one would normally consider a 'desktop'. The issues you would consider for specialized, turn-key applications are quite different that the issues you would consider for picking a desktop for the everyday user. There are tons of ATMs and POS machines out there that run OS/2, and some are probably still being deployed, but I doubt many today or then would still recommend OS/2 for the desktop (and I was a rabid OS/2 fan).
I think it would be silly to change your bank simply because your OS doesn't support it. Imagine there was some bank out there whose website did not render properly on IE - how silly would an MS zealot look if he suggested affected companies change their banks ? ? How loud would that zealot get shouted down here ?
The choice of an OS should not determine a company's policies elsewhere.
And I would bet that the original poster's company spent some time training their employees, and their failure to get comfortable with Linux reflects both the reality of the state of the Linux desktop and the level of comfort people have with the MS desktop, rather than the lack of adequacy of training. Just this weekend I installed Mandrake 8.1 and spent way too much time 1) figuring out how to move the Windows95-style taskbar from the left side to the bottom, and 2) figuring out how to change the layout of said task bar. Things like that should not be that difficult.
I used to teach at a major university. If students are not paying attention to what's happening at the front of the class, I would much prefer they leave and go elsewhere. This is not so much because I care about what they are doing to themselves, but that I care about what they are doing to others who *are* interested: Students reading a paper or sleeping are distracting to the instructor and (worse) they are distracting to other students. If students were surfing the Net they would be even more disruptive. Should instructors and the class need to worry about someone hitting a webpage that plays music in his class ? Should the university worry about possible lawsuits stemming from students viewing pornography (inadvertently or otherwise) and offending others?
Teachers commonly prohibit behaviour like chewing gum and talking in class and can throw students out for doing so precisely because this behaviour can disturb the class. So why in these cases are civil liberties people not running around crying about abridgements of freedom of speech ? Because even they understand such activity is only detrimental to everyone involved.
A little sanity and a little less arm-waving, please.
While we're at it let's get rid of all the posts about the virtues of the GPL, and all the posts about the evils of Microsoft. Also let's get rid of all the posts about why patents are bad, as well as the posts about why the RIAA and MPAA are bad and infringing on our libterties. After all, it has been said a million times, and it's true, but it's not news to anyone. If you have actual insightful comments, make them.
I found this post ironic because in the last few years many tech workers have enjoyed an ability to switch from job to job, garnering raises and promotions on the way. Employee mobility, especially in the tech sector, has been higher in the last 3-4 years than it probably has ever been. This, I would expect most readers here would agree, is a Good Thing.
But I wonder, don't "job security" and "employee loyalty" go hand in hand ? Sure, employees will be more loyal to companies that offer the kinds of perks Katz talks about, but aren't companies also more likely offer those kinds of perks if they had some reason to believe their employees would show them loyalty ? How, in this time of unprecedented worker mobility, can we fairly expect companies to extend things like 3-6 months termination notice when companies probably would be derided for expecting 3-6 months of notice when one of their employees decided to leave for greener pastures ?
In short, what kind of responsibilities ought we have to our employers ? Is it reasonable to expect that companies should be any less self-interested than we workers are ?
as I understood it companies are structured to protect the shareholders and executives from the creditors of the company
Sorry, what I meant was that the shareholders and executives were protected from legal action by the creditors, such as I imagined the original poster to be seeking. i.e., the executives and shareholders are not *personally* liable for any debt undertaken by the company and could not be sued.
It doesn't make me sick. I sympathize with the employees, and they should do all they can *within the law* to seek remedy, but this is the way business works. *Individuals* declare bankruptcy all the time, leaving their creditors out to dry; does that make you sick ? Would you argue it was OK for the creditors to sneak into their house and steal the individual's belongings ?
When I worked for a dot-com-wannabe years ago, I had a problem with a pay check that kept bouncing. For a few days management was explaining this as being due to various sundry problems that were all, of course, the bank's fault. Finally I walked into the CEO's office and told him that I needed my money and that if I didn't receive it there would be a problem. We both understood this to mean I would not work anymore until I was paid what I was owed. I received a personal check the next day. My point is, I can't feel *too much* sympathy for employees who let their company get too far in arrears.
And as for your own justification of the theivery, I have a hard time imagining that any of these employees were *quite* stupid enough to be owed so much money that they could 'justify' stealing some of the larger-ticket items described in the article.
Does anybody know what recourse there is for people like me to get the money owed them?
You go after them in bankruptcy court. Michael's intimation that somehow the employees' theivery is justified in these situations is just so stupid it makes me sick.
As for whether or not you can go after the assets of the CEOs, I believe you cannot. IANAL, but as I understood it companies are structured to protect the shareholders and executives from the creditors of the company. Now, if some of them were personally negligent, this might be different, but problems arising from their actions as executives of the company are probably not actionable.
So you don't like the terms that attach to FrontPage ? Simple, DON'T USE IT AND RETURN THE PRODUCT. After all, this is what everyone who objects to the (equally dubious) clauses of the GPL are told, isn't it ? Why is one set of restrictive conditions being vilified while another set of restrictive conditions sanctified ? Certainly in both cases consumers and users have plenty of choices available.
It might seem silly to blame Boeing or the construction engineers, but would it be silly to blame the airlines and airports that set the security policies that allowed people to slip onto planes with apparently innocuous items turned into deadly weapons ? Would it be silly to criticize the design of airplanes that allow easy access to the cockpit, or the design of cockpit doors which are easily breached ? Would it be silly to criticize the people who set immigration policies allowing some of these people to enter the U.S., Canada, and other countries on sometimes tenuous grounds ? Is it silly to question the engineering designs that allow a plane to be crashed into a building ?
If these things are not all silly, why not question whether or not a tool like PGP might have helped facilitate the attacks ? *If* it turned out that PGP-encrypted communication was intercepted by the FBI or NSA, but could not be decrypted in time, would that be irrelevant ? Would wondering about cryptography and what we want to allow be so silly then ?
While I was struck by the mundaneness of the Sims, and never *really* liked the game, right after I got it I spent way too many hours in a weekend playing it (I was determined to see how far I could progress in the military). Then I took a break from the game, started taking a shower and I swear I could see my hygiene and comfort levels rising from red to green. That's when I knew I had to stop playing it.
I love this guy. Where do I donate to his cause?
Not sure, but I bet you will be able to write to him shortly c/o Dept. of Corrections.
I don't question the usefulness. I *do* question how judicious the doctors were in performing the demonstration. This procedure was almost certainly not a life-or-death one that could only be performed by specific doctors in the U.S. So performing it in this fashion *must* have exposed this patient to some risks, even if there were qualified doctors on the patient's side of the ocean overseeing the work, else this story would not be newsworthy. The doctors therefore exposed a patient to some risk just for a proof-of-concept, a publication, and a lot of P.R., when the proof-of-concept could have been done by operating on a pig, or just demonstrating the requisite dexterity in some other fashion. I guess this is just another case where the vanity of surgeons conflicted and overrode the safety and interest of the patient involved. What would the press release have looked like if the patient had died, I wonder.
You can never go back. I fear all this project will do is demonstrate the reality isn't a match for my memory of the past.
Amen. On the Apple II I *loved* the game Wizardry. That game was so far ahead of its time. However, I'm (just) smart enough to realize that no manner of updating the engine/graphics/etc is going to bring this game up-to-snuff with modern games designed from the ground up with today's technology, unless the whole game is reworked. And if the latter, what's the point ? To me, this is just like the colorization of all those old movie classics that Ted Turner was - rightly - so roundly criticized for - it just tarnishes what was once golden.
What we really need is an up-to-date remake with a modern 3-d rendering engine of the classic Apple game 'Lemonade'.
They shouldn't do this for the same reason they shouldn't be installing cable tv services, or telephone services, cell phone networks, or movie theaters: these are non-essential services which the private sector is willing and able to provide, and which governments have little experience or expertise with. The only thing governments should be providing for us are public goods which the private sector cannot or will not provide us.
Further, I have little confidence in the ability of a municipal or other government to provide efficient, inexpensive Internet (or other) services, and I can think of many more things I would rather have them provide or improve. If the government really feels a need to provide their citizens with connectivity I think it is best done with a limited number of Internet kiosks at places like libraries, city halls, etc, but I would vote against anybody who would suggest that providing more than this is the job of our government.
I think this is the biggest reason why these and most subsequent domains are going to be mostly undesirable. The threat of litigation, combined with the fact that most 'good' domains (sans tld suffix) are gone, conspire to make protecting yourself from a cyber-squatter the only good reason to get a (.biz,
Sure, there are OSS successes, but I can't believe the author makes a definitive argument for OSS in business as a core part of a company's business plan - there are just too few examples of real solid successes and fewer still of money-making, solvent OSS-based companies.
Am I missing something ? How can a language 'support' another language (I assume this means relatively full support), support other languages, and yet still be faster than *any* of the languages ? The only thing I can imagine is that their compilers are better, but somehow I doubt that's the answer.
I think we may also be underestimating how dynamic CNN etc's web pages may be. It is clear, for instance, that pages are customized to some extent by broad geographical region. They have seem to display random user's comments in several sections. There is probably other dynamism going on there, too.