Maybe Ariston should have sent him an e-mail for each one that they gave away...
Yes, what they did was slimy, but that's why so many authors include in their licenses prohibitions against bundling their software with commercial products.
I own a motorcycle but have enough sense to drive my truck if I go to buy lumber. I don't post questions like "isn't there any way to carry lumber on my motorcycle"?
Windows is a much better platform for surfing web than *nix is. Web sites are often optimised for Windows platforms running IE and the assumption is made that the plug-ins are available for media content. I'm not saying that it's a good thing (it is not), but that's reality.
I have a machine running Mandrake and also have boot partitions for BeOS 5.0 and FreeBSD 4.2, but I would not use them for my primary web surfing.
April 1, 2001, Redwood City, CA -- Representatives of the Internet music sharing service Napster announced today that they have reached an agreement with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Under the terms of the agreement, all music files shared via Napster will pass through Napster servers where they will undergo LZIP compression. As part of the agreement, the RIAA and all of its members will drop all pending lawsuits against the music sharing service and will grant Napster licenses to distribute their extensive catalogs of copyrighted music via LZIP compressed files. At today's press conference, Napster founder Shaun Fanning hailed the decision as being "good for the record companies, good for the artists, and good for Napster users -- who will experience much faster downloads while needing far less hard disc storage." Mr. Fanning went on to say that Napster will continue to offer MP3 downloads of music by artists that no one wants to hear and that users should "keep an eye out for the latest single from The Flaming Pit Bulls -- an accordian power trio that skillfully blends punk, country, hip-hop, and new age."
I just don't understand the twisted belief that aggregating the viewing habits of the entire TiVo subscriber base is a privacy concern. In order for something to be a "privacy" issue, it must relate to "private" (see the similarity of the words?) information about a person, not statistical information about a large group.
It's this kind of story that makes us seem like paranoid nuts to the population at large. Why don't we only sound the alarm when a company does violate people's privacy rather than every time we find out that some company could, if the so chose, violate someone's privacy?
You pay mucho dollars for Windows. You have a right to expect something. Linux is free - no one is paying the developers.
I don't want a commercial OS that is unstable. Nor do I want a free OS that is unstable. I want a stable OS and I'll pay for it if I have to. Is that asking so much?
The people that would do it obviously dont care about what others think, whether its ethically right or legal etc. They would do it so they could be the first if for no other reason
You are a self-righteous little shit, aren't you? You label everyone in favor of human cloning as unethical, asocial, criminals just because you disagree with them. Some people feel that it is ethical. In fact, some of those that feel that human cloning is ethical are bioethicists. And they feel strongly that it should be legal. I suggest that you go to http://www.humancloning.org/ and read a little before shooting off your mouth.
While the general idea of human cloning intrigues me, I think that there need to be limits to its use. For instance, I'd start with a provision that only brain tissue could be used for cloning. That way, I could rest comfortably knowing that there will never be a clone of you unleashed on society.
For a core THAT old to still be giving birth to new products TODAY is a testament to how well designed it was. (And also gives reason as to why Intel is losing the coveted speed race-- the PPro core was never designed to go as far as it has, it just did simply because it was designed so well to begin with.)
The reason that a core that old is still in use is that they got rid of most of their highest-paid (read "most experienced") engineers. Because of that, they have been unable to produce a reliable, fast core to replace the P-Pro.
I'll take AMD for innovation. They have embraced DDR RAM, have produced a FPU that kicks sand (silicon?) in Intel's face, and have dept driving the price of performance down.
P.S. Yes, I will grant that the i815e is a nice chipset, but the lack of support for DDR combined with the limitation for PC133 makes it a lot less desirable than many of the AMD offerings.
I still hold Intel in a higher regard simply because they tend to offer more in the way of innovation.
Every CPU that they have offered in recent years has been based on the ancient Pentium Pro core (the PII, PIII, and Celeron are all based on a P-Pro core). Finally they come out with the P4 and, frankly, its performance does not do justice to its gestation period.
You also ignore their laughably bad motherboard chipsets. Until recently, if you wanted top performance and stability, you went with the 440BX, which was designed years ago.
But they were the first CPU manufacturer to include a processor ID and a to sign up to exclusively support Rambus.
They sold it for $299. The $100 price was a promotional price at its launch.
The price at its launch (on July 16, 1999) was not $99 as you claim, but was, instead, $399 as shown in this CNet announcement. At the time, Netpliance was calling it the "Ipad." By December of 1999, they had dropped the price to $199 as shown in this PC Magazine news story.In July of 2000, Netpliance announced that they were raising the price of the i-opener from $99 to $399 as shown in this Netpliance press release and in this CNet news article. At the end of August, after dismal sales, Netpliance lowered the price to $299 as shown in this CNet news article. I believe that they sold more i-openers at $99 than at all of the other price points combined.
Next time, get your facts straight before claiming that I am wrong.
While QNX was a pre-existing operating system, it was/is hardly an industry standard. Just look at the dearth of software, commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, etc. available for it. Choosing an OS that does not enjoy industry-wide support is suicidal.
Having standard hardware did not hurt Netpliance. What hurt them was selling the i-opener at a tremendous loss ($400 manufacturing cost and $100 sales price) in the hope that they would make up the cost in overpriced Internet access fees. If the device had been priced at $450, I don't think that either of us would have bought them to hack. But Netpliance was, in essence, paying hackers $300 to find a way to hack it. At the same time, by only taking $100 from "real users", there was little commitment on the part of the users. They had no big investment in making this work. With high monthly fees (partially to offset the loss from the sale of the units), there was a real incentive for their users, many of whom were older and on a fixed income or otherwise not well off financially, to cancel the service to save money.
Netpliance should have sold the hardware at, or just above, cost and used Linux and open source software. For those that would prefer to make their own box, Netpliance should have made a bootable CD-ROM that could run on a "standard" PC (for which they could have produced a hardware specification). Storage of settings, e-mail, etc. could have been on a floppy disk (or flash in their custom box). They could have even sold a custom keyboard (with Pizza key) for everyone who wanted to put a PC on their network. They could have given the disks away and half the geeks on the planet would have cobbled together boxes to put grandma on the net. Netpliance could have charged a $19.95/month fee for access, push content, software updates, etc. and not started off $300 in the hole. Then when grandma forgot (for the 53rd time) how to send e-mail, they would have fielded the tech support call. And if grandma lost interest, got Alzheimer's, or died in a year, Netpliance would not be out all that money.
It's the AOL model with a twist: You provide pre-chewed content with a simplified interface and lots of tech support for a high price. The difference is that AOL requires a real computer while this could have been done with an appliance at a lower cost while shielding your users from the complexity of the OS in a way that AOL cannot.
The Internet appliance market is viable. It just needs some common sense engineering and marketing to make it work. Selling $400 worth of custom hardware for $100 -- with no minimum commitment for service -- is no way to become profitable. This is especially true when your target market consists largely of people likely to find that they don't use, like, or want Internet access.
I happened to have just worked for a company oriented around selling an "Internet appliance" to the consumer market and there just wasn't a business model that could support it.
That company didn't happen to be Netpliance, did it? I have a couple of their i-openers at home, one hacked and running Windows and one waiting to be hacked. I could write a book on their mistakes and practically did on my web site
The basic flaw with all of these devices is the non-standard hardware and OS. The company selling the devices has to foot the bill for creating the content delivery software that exists on the box. And no matter how hard they try, they will always be behind the curve. There is simply no financial incentive for AOL Netscape, Apple, or Microsoft, for example, to make copies of their browsers or plug-ins for some non-standard Internet appliance. Thus, when the new version of HTML, Quicktime, or Windows audio file comes out, the appliance users are hosed unless/until the vendor creates or buys the software.
All of this is a reason that Microsoft will never support Java. If plug-ins could be written in Java and be platform independent, network appliances would become practical. For every one of those sold, that's one less copy of Windows that Microsoft would sell.
No, I'm one of those rare people that thinks our tax rates in the U.S. are pretty fair (and I am pretty far up there in the tax brackets). In this case, I just don't want to see my tax dollars used as a tool to force cyber-censoring. The last thing the U.S. government should be engaging in is censorship.
I also like giving people access to information on birth control and an unfettered Internet. I'm just not convinced it's a government job to do so.
In this case, it's the government trying to take away that access. They want to withold federal money (read: "your taxes") from public libraries that provide unfiltered Internet access.
Internet access is the most efficient use of library funds. Where else can you buy a subscription to something that has information on every topic known to man, up-to-the-minute news, and can be searched in seconds? Crippling that to satisfy a bunch of technophobic conservatives would be a dire mistake.
The company you are working for is completely without ethics and you should find yourself a better employer. Have you pointed out to your employer that Virginia's anti-spam law allows a Virginia ISP (e.g., AOL) to sue spammers and recoup $25,000 total or $X (don't remember X) per spam, whichever is HIGHER? Maybe if they don't have ethics, they will at least have enough sense to be concerned.
I would prefer that you list your boss's home phone number on here so that we can call him and reason with him...;-)
So which is it? Is "behavior around women" an important characteristic for those holding high office, or isn't it?
Are you really so stupid that you cannot discern the difference between sexual harassment in the workplace and consensual sex between two adults? The former indicates a lack of respect for women while the latter does not. And the latter is all that they could dig up on Clinton.
raise the money yourself and give it to these schools!
The conservatives would love it if every spare dime and minute that the liberals had was spent shoring up the programs that the right-wing zealots tried to tear down. Well, it's not my job to privately fund every worthwhile program that some conservative manages to neuter or kill. As American citizens, we have a legal right to challenge unconstitutional laws and that is just what is happening here.
I'm sick of being told that my tax dollars will fund massive military programs but that if I want poor people to have access to health care, the Internet, or information on birth control, I have to pay out of my own pockets. Bullshit.
Thanks for the details of Watergate. I never intended to dispute that Nixon was a bad seed. I just happen to believe that Clinton and he are equals with respect to corruption.
Sorry, but I cannot view Clinton's attempts to cover up his extramarital affair as even being remotely as heinous as what Nixon did. It's like when people on Internet start comparing online censors to Hitler.
Isn't it amazing that the Democrats attribute so much power to the words of a man they consider to be so stupid?
Not at all. There are many stupid world leaders and, like it or not, their positions give their words power.
But making campaign donaitions calls from your government office phone is illegal hmm.....
Gore made the phone calls using a Clinton-Gore campaign credit card. The guy was honest and was making sure that the calls weren't paid for by the taxpayers. As I have asked before, was he supposed to duck out to go to a pay phone at a convenience store? What he did was not illegal! That's what none of the Republicans wants to admit. They would have tried to have Mother Theresa investigated if she had declared herself a Democrat.
what a horrible thing it would be if someone like Bork were on the court.
Yes it would be. Richard Nixon ordered the Attorney-General, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Richardson refused to do so and resigned. His deputy was then canned for refusing to carry out Nixon's order. So who did fire Cox? The Solicitor-General, your hero, Robert Bork.
Right about now, you are probably feeling like a complete idiot. Or you are even more of one than I guessed.
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Maybe Ariston should have sent him an e-mail for each one that they gave away...
Yes, what they did was slimy, but that's why so many authors include in their licenses prohibitions against bundling their software with commercial products.
P.S. All your free software are belong to us.
Windows is a much better platform for surfing web than *nix is. Web sites are often optimised for Windows platforms running IE and the assumption is made that the plug-ins are available for media content. I'm not saying that it's a good thing (it is not), but that's reality.
I have a machine running Mandrake and also have boot partitions for BeOS 5.0 and FreeBSD 4.2, but I would not use them for my primary web surfing.
April 1, 2001, Redwood City, CA -- Representatives of the Internet music sharing service Napster announced today that they have reached an agreement with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Under the terms of the agreement, all music files shared via Napster will pass through Napster servers where they will undergo LZIP compression. As part of the agreement, the RIAA and all of its members will drop all pending lawsuits against the music sharing service and will grant Napster licenses to distribute their extensive catalogs of copyrighted music via LZIP compressed files. At today's press conference, Napster founder Shaun Fanning hailed the decision as being "good for the record companies, good for the artists, and good for Napster users -- who will experience much faster downloads while needing far less hard disc storage." Mr. Fanning went on to say that Napster will continue to offer MP3 downloads of music by artists that no one wants to hear and that users should "keep an eye out for the latest single from The Flaming Pit Bulls -- an accordian power trio that skillfully blends punk, country, hip-hop, and new age."
It's this kind of story that makes us seem like paranoid nuts to the population at large. Why don't we only sound the alarm when a company does violate people's privacy rather than every time we find out that some company could, if the so chose, violate someone's privacy?
Why would you run a 2-bit OS on a 64 bit CPU?
I don't want a commercial OS that is unstable. Nor do I want a free OS that is unstable. I want a stable OS and I'll pay for it if I have to. Is that asking so much?
You are such an incredible loser! You seem proud that you are so pathetic that you saw the story before those of us with lives did.
I've said the Mac was hosed for a long time...
Thank you. It's good to be appreciated and honored by my peers.
You are a self-righteous little shit, aren't you? You label everyone in favor of human cloning as unethical, asocial, criminals just because you disagree with them. Some people feel that it is ethical. In fact, some of those that feel that human cloning is ethical are bioethicists. And they feel strongly that it should be legal. I suggest that you go to http://www.humancloning.org/ and read a little before shooting off your mouth.
While the general idea of human cloning intrigues me, I think that there need to be limits to its use. For instance, I'd start with a provision that only brain tissue could be used for cloning. That way, I could rest comfortably knowing that there will never be a clone of you unleashed on society.
The reason that a core that old is still in use is that they got rid of most of their highest-paid (read "most experienced") engineers. Because of that, they have been unable to produce a reliable, fast core to replace the P-Pro.
I'll take AMD for innovation. They have embraced DDR RAM, have produced a FPU that kicks sand (silicon?) in Intel's face, and have dept driving the price of performance down.
P.S. Yes, I will grant that the i815e is a nice chipset, but the lack of support for DDR combined with the limitation for PC133 makes it a lot less desirable than many of the AMD offerings.
Every CPU that they have offered in recent years has been based on the ancient Pentium Pro core (the PII, PIII, and Celeron are all based on a P-Pro core). Finally they come out with the P4 and, frankly, its performance does not do justice to its gestation period.
You also ignore their laughably bad motherboard chipsets. Until recently, if you wanted top performance and stability, you went with the 440BX, which was designed years ago.
But they were the first CPU manufacturer to include a processor ID and a to sign up to exclusively support Rambus.
If I wanted to see a trio of blue-painted mimes passed off as entertainment, I would have moved to France years ago.
The price at its launch (on July 16, 1999) was not $99 as you claim, but was, instead, $399 as shown in this CNet announcement. At the time, Netpliance was calling it the "Ipad." By December of 1999, they had dropped the price to $199 as shown in this PC Magazine news story.In July of 2000, Netpliance announced that they were raising the price of the i-opener from $99 to $399 as shown in this Netpliance press release and in this CNet news article. At the end of August, after dismal sales, Netpliance lowered the price to $299 as shown in this CNet news article. I believe that they sold more i-openers at $99 than at all of the other price points combined.
Next time, get your facts straight before claiming that I am wrong.
Having standard hardware did not hurt Netpliance. What hurt them was selling the i-opener at a tremendous loss ($400 manufacturing cost and $100 sales price) in the hope that they would make up the cost in overpriced Internet access fees. If the device had been priced at $450, I don't think that either of us would have bought them to hack. But Netpliance was, in essence, paying hackers $300 to find a way to hack it. At the same time, by only taking $100 from "real users", there was little commitment on the part of the users. They had no big investment in making this work. With high monthly fees (partially to offset the loss from the sale of the units), there was a real incentive for their users, many of whom were older and on a fixed income or otherwise not well off financially, to cancel the service to save money.
Netpliance should have sold the hardware at, or just above, cost and used Linux and open source software. For those that would prefer to make their own box, Netpliance should have made a bootable CD-ROM that could run on a "standard" PC (for which they could have produced a hardware specification). Storage of settings, e-mail, etc. could have been on a floppy disk (or flash in their custom box). They could have even sold a custom keyboard (with Pizza key) for everyone who wanted to put a PC on their network. They could have given the disks away and half the geeks on the planet would have cobbled together boxes to put grandma on the net. Netpliance could have charged a $19.95/month fee for access, push content, software updates, etc. and not started off $300 in the hole. Then when grandma forgot (for the 53rd time) how to send e-mail, they would have fielded the tech support call. And if grandma lost interest, got Alzheimer's, or died in a year, Netpliance would not be out all that money.
It's the AOL model with a twist: You provide pre-chewed content with a simplified interface and lots of tech support for a high price. The difference is that AOL requires a real computer while this could have been done with an appliance at a lower cost while shielding your users from the complexity of the OS in a way that AOL cannot.
The Internet appliance market is viable. It just needs some common sense engineering and marketing to make it work. Selling $400 worth of custom hardware for $100 -- with no minimum commitment for service -- is no way to become profitable. This is especially true when your target market consists largely of people likely to find that they don't use, like, or want Internet access.
That company didn't happen to be Netpliance, did it? I have a couple of their i-openers at home, one hacked and running Windows and one waiting to be hacked. I could write a book on their mistakes and practically did on my web site
The basic flaw with all of these devices is the non-standard hardware and OS. The company selling the devices has to foot the bill for creating the content delivery software that exists on the box. And no matter how hard they try, they will always be behind the curve. There is simply no financial incentive for AOL Netscape, Apple, or Microsoft, for example, to make copies of their browsers or plug-ins for some non-standard Internet appliance. Thus, when the new version of HTML, Quicktime, or Windows audio file comes out, the appliance users are hosed unless/until the vendor creates or buys the software.
All of this is a reason that Microsoft will never support Java. If plug-ins could be written in Java and be platform independent, network appliances would become practical. For every one of those sold, that's one less copy of Windows that Microsoft would sell.
No, I'm one of those rare people that thinks our tax rates in the U.S. are pretty fair (and I am pretty far up there in the tax brackets). In this case, I just don't want to see my tax dollars used as a tool to force cyber-censoring. The last thing the U.S. government should be engaging in is censorship.
I also like giving people access to information on birth control and an unfettered Internet. I'm just not convinced it's a government job to do so.
In this case, it's the government trying to take away that access. They want to withold federal money (read: "your taxes") from public libraries that provide unfiltered Internet access.
Internet access is the most efficient use of library funds. Where else can you buy a subscription to something that has information on every topic known to man, up-to-the-minute news, and can be searched in seconds? Crippling that to satisfy a bunch of technophobic conservatives would be a dire mistake.
I would prefer that you list your boss's home phone number on here so that we can call him and reason with him... ;-)
He did and was lambasted by the Republicans for doing so.
That's just what I want in a Supreme Court Justice: Someone who makes bad decisions.
Are you really so stupid that you cannot discern the difference between sexual harassment in the workplace and consensual sex between two adults? The former indicates a lack of respect for women while the latter does not. And the latter is all that they could dig up on Clinton.
The conservatives would love it if every spare dime and minute that the liberals had was spent shoring up the programs that the right-wing zealots tried to tear down. Well, it's not my job to privately fund every worthwhile program that some conservative manages to neuter or kill. As American citizens, we have a legal right to challenge unconstitutional laws and that is just what is happening here.
I'm sick of being told that my tax dollars will fund massive military programs but that if I want poor people to have access to health care, the Internet, or information on birth control, I have to pay out of my own pockets. Bullshit.
Sorry, but I cannot view Clinton's attempts to cover up his extramarital affair as even being remotely as heinous as what Nixon did. It's like when people on Internet start comparing online censors to Hitler.
Isn't it amazing that the Democrats attribute so much power to the words of a man they consider to be so stupid?
Not at all. There are many stupid world leaders and, like it or not, their positions give their words power.
Gore made the phone calls using a Clinton-Gore campaign credit card. The guy was honest and was making sure that the calls weren't paid for by the taxpayers. As I have asked before, was he supposed to duck out to go to a pay phone at a convenience store? What he did was not illegal! That's what none of the Republicans wants to admit. They would have tried to have Mother Theresa investigated if she had declared herself a Democrat.
Yes it would be. Richard Nixon ordered the Attorney-General, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Richardson refused to do so and resigned. His deputy was then canned for refusing to carry out Nixon's order. So who did fire Cox? The Solicitor-General, your hero, Robert Bork.
Right about now, you are probably feeling like a complete idiot. Or you are even more of one than I guessed.