It's important to note that in US law, being a monopoly is not, by itself, illegal. There are, however, laws against several types of anticompetitive behaviour, and having the power of a monopoly means that you are held to a higher standard regarding such behaviours.
So far as I know, no court has examined whether or not ebay is a monopoly. I personally would say they qualify (in light of the extremely strong network effects of the auction broker market), but I'm not a judge.
The sense in which ebay's policy would be most likely to be found illegal, especially as a monopoly, is "bundling": forcing customers to use your non-monopoly product to get access to your monopoly product. This is the way to extend your monopoly beyond its current bounds, which tends to be frowned upon.
No idea yet how that'll play out in this case, though. Even if it ever did come to a trial, resolution would probably be around a decade out. If there's anything that Microsoft has taught us, it's that the judicial system takes about three orders of magnitude too long to effectively stop such predatory practices.
I think that good, concurrent mac versions are a lot of what have made Blizzard's games so successful. There are literally millions of people out there with modern macs; a nontrivial number of those people have some interest in gaming, and a limited number of options available to them. Being one of a small number of companies willing to cater to them has to be extremely lucrative.
I know that I've been tempted to quit WoW for another game.. but there just aren't any, so I keep paying Blizzard. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are another million or so people in the same boat, which is more players than most games ever see. Blizzard is raking in cash from this underserved market, and I'm kind of surprised that no one else has yet figured this out and decided to get in on it.
Bahahahah! That has got to be the most atrocious company/product/model/version name that I've ever seen.
Take something that might be the chemical formula for oxygen molecules or might not, add an unpronounceable thing that might or might not be an acronym, add on another word that's currently being used by a completely unrelated technology, and top it off with a word that already means either a person or a system call, but never a piece of hardware, and you get a true miracle of impenetrable gibberish. I honestly think that it might be literally impossible to create a worse name.
Uh, as I said, I'm repeating a story that was told to me by a coworker some years back.
Maybe he got it from the jargon file. Maybe he's the one that added it to the jargon file. Maybe it has happened to more than one person. I don't know, but I'd hardly call any of the above plagiarism.
Or perhaps "plagarizing" is something different? (Sorry, it's hard to resist a cheap shot at spelling when someone has jumped right to name-calling.)
Some years ago a colleague told me about the strangest support problem he had ever run into: one of their developers could only log in sitting down.
He had recently noticed that if he tried to log in in any other position (eg, still standing and just quickly checking his mail while walking past his desk), his password was always rejected. But as soon as he sat down, he had no problems getting in.
My colleague at first laughed it off, but it was demonstrated to be the case. He spent a long time looking into cabling problems with the keyboard or network, thinking that perhaps there was a loose connection that only worked reliably with the guy's foot on it or similar longshots. Nothing panned out, and they eventually gave up on it as not important enough to dig into further.
Finally, months later, the developer came back to him, doubled over in laughter, having figured out what the problem was. At some point in the process of cleaning his keyboard, he had reassembled it with a couple of keys juxtaposed. Which never cause him problems, because he touch-typed... when he was sitting in a normal position. When he was standing awkwardly, he looked at the keycaps, and typed his password wrong every time.
Civilians have no business wandering around a war zone.
So it's a good thing that warzones are always carefully put far away from any civilians are or will ever be, right?....right?
And you're supposed to clean up the minefield after you're done with it.
Even if you have some jaw-droppingly naive ideas about how warfaring governments behave, allow me to bring to your attention that (at least) 50% of all participants in wars end up losing them, and thus in little position to do anything about the aftermath.
According to TFA, they compared phone users to drivers who were at the legal blood-alcohol limit, not those above it. So they have, at most, demonstrated that driving while using a phone is more dangerous than other driving that we consider legal. Obviously there's some level of drunkenness that would be more impairing than phone use; finding out where that point is would be considerably more interesting than what this study actually did examine.
I'd also love to hear more detail about the "hand-free" devices that they used for the test. Were these earpieces, or something more speakerphoneish? I seem to recall another study finding that the problem with driving while using a phone is not having your hands occupied, it's the mental isolation that happens as your brain divides resources between your conversational world and your driving world. And that earpieces did not change this, but that speakerphones _did_.
A sufficiently brutal telco regime might lead to that, but it would be a problematic solution on two fronts:
The first is just that reimplementing a worldwide network would be a huge needless burden. Having copper cabling routed individually to every home in every industrialized nation in the world is an unimaginably huge deal, something that has taken about a century of heavy governmental subsidies to accomplish.
The second is perhaps even more fundamental to the actual problem of bundling content to carrier. You _know_ that within about the first six seconds of telcos charging content providers for access, some big site is going to suggest that instead of paying money, they just make an exclusivity deal. So then you get a world in which {cnn,youtube,ebay,whatever} is _only_ available to {verizon,time warner,whatever} subscribers. At which point the magic telco-alternative is one more leg down.
Remember that cable providers in general are incredibly good at making content-bundling policies that are exactly as burdensome and costly and inconvenient as they can be without driving customers to other alternatives. It's what they're built to do. And I'd really like to not see them do it to the Internet.
The Bush administration's warrentless spying program is clearly in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act passed in, if I'm remembering correctly, 1971.
You're correct that no court has yet ruled on this issue, but I don't think that it's reasonable to describe its legality as being unknown. By way of example, I think it's far more reasonable to say, "If I were go to out and burn down the nearest post office, that would be illegal" than to say, "Well, I haven't yet been through a trial for burning down this particular post office, so we can't really say whether it's legal or not."
As far as I know, the ad prices are determined entirely by what advertisers bid for them, rather than being rates that Google sets.
Even if you do accept the ad prices as being "evil", it's still not something over which Google has any control, so it seems problematic to use that as an predictor of future evilness.
Yes, it's an atrocity. I actually spent a few seconds glancing at the source and trying to find the real content. (Hint to authors: when your page includes "content.html" in a frame, that's is a sign that everything else is dross.) I finally dug up a content-like page, which... was only the first item in the list. And included a "link" to the next item, which of course failed similarly to work.
The trick of breaking your story up into multiple parts to artificially inflate your hit count is tacky even when your sodding html actually works.
I wish ID would go back to their roots and stop making these single player tech demos
But... those are ID's roots. ID has always been strong on tech expertise and engine optimization, and weak on content, visual design, and gameplay mechanics.
The clearest (and most relevant to this discussion) example is the contrast between Quake and Marathon. Quake had some of the first genuinely 3d-modeled environments and characters, including some incredible details like specular highlights off even your own weapons; the underlying tech was astounding. But it also had extremely simplistic gameplay that rewarded extremely simplistic behaviours (run all the time and shoot all the time), very monotonous visual design, and not even the pretense of plot or backstory.
Conversely, Marathon used 2d sprites for everything that moved. Rockets would always appear dead horizontal as they flew through the air, even if flying almost straight up or down. Running animations constituted cycling through a small handful of different sprites. And yet, it had incredibly fun gameplay mechanics that rewarded many different playstyles, the level design and visual style were brilliant, and there was backstory interesting enough to make you want to stop and read it even while under fire.
I think that ID's decision to focus on making engines on which other companies can build their games was a fantastic one. Engine creation and game creation really are very separate skills, and there's no reason to expect or even want the same group of people to handle both. This allows ID to concentrate on what they do well, game designers to do likewise, and game players to get the best intersection of everyone's abilities.
If we were experiencing
completely-free capitalism, there would not (in theory) be any unregulated
monopoly. Right?
Um, unless I'm completely failing to get your point... no, not right at all.
Completely unrestrained capitalism has a strong tendency toward monopoly. A monopoly is actually a more stable state in a free market than genuine competition is; monopolies are easy to fall into, and very hard to get out of.
Hence the value of regulation to tip markets more toward ongoing competition and away from monopoly. This is unquestionably a worse deal for the most successful corporations, but generally a better deal for consumers. And I know which of those two groups I'd like to win that fight.
Because the model of having content packages bound to ISPs is a step backward.
Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, the early AOL, and all the thousands of bbses out there? Where each one was its own little closed system with its own content, and if you wanted to access anything from them or their users, you needed an account with them?
It was awful, and there's a reason that they all evaporated as soon as the Internet and its dumb-in-the-middle model became available. Where choosing your content and choosing your access provider became separate acts, so you could choose the best of each; rather than needing to decide between, say, a company with unreliable service but access to the content you really want, or a company with reliable service but nothing you really want to use.
Flat access to everything is one of the basic design premises of the Internet, and one of the things that has made us all love it so. Allowing wire monopolists to drag us back to the many-walled-gardens model would be a tragedy.
Actually, I'm not concerned about the Googles, the Yahoos, or the Microsofts of the world. You're right, they can afford to grease the telcos' palms without batting an eye.
I'm concerned about the next Google or Yahoo. (Okay, screw the next Microsoft.) What about that great new company that will have an idea for a fantastic new service a couple years from now, but can't afford to pay for the phone and cable companies' protection racket to make it available to users?
And the funny thing is, this is actually most of the problem.
Telcos and cable companies have been so mad for market share that they've continued to cut prices until offering residential data service is actually not profitable for them.
And suddenly now they've noticed that they've got million of subscribers, and they're losing money on every one of them. They "can't" raise prices, because then those unprofitable customers would go somewhere else, which would retroactively invalidate the war they've been waging for years for market share at any cost.
So they've found a third option: charge on the other side as well! Keep losing money on every customer, but make it back up by using that huge customer base as a hammer with which to extort content providers.
This seems like a stunningly clear example of the problematic behaviour of unregulated monopoly. (Okay, duopoly, between your local telco and your local cable co.) It certainly does nothing to change my opinion that completely free-reign capitalism is as problematic as total socialism, and that they right mix is about five parts laissez faire to one part regulation.
It is absolutely true that snmpd, sar, and whathaveyou count as "agents" as much as anything else. However, you've artificially limited the discussion to only the range of monitoring appraoches that use such tools; of course when you only discuss types of monitoring that use agents, there is no such thing as agentless monitoring.
However, many (and arguably many of the best) monitoring approaches simply observe the behaviour of the actual running services, without using any additional tools on the monitored systems.
eg, want to know whether your webserver is up? Don't rely on a tool running on the webserver machine to look for the process and tell you whether it thinks it's up; just give it a request. Want to know how quickly your webserver serves requests? Just give it the request you care about and time how long the interesting bits of it take. This approach is often referred to as "black box" or "end to end" monitoring, though the latter can be something of a misnomer.
I would argue that such approaches not only exist, they have decided advantages. Asking a tool on a monitored machine whether it is correctly handling requests will never be as authoritative as simply asking it to handle a request and confirming the results.
I'd say that the biggest drawback to the whole category of approaches involving cooperative monitoring is that it adds complexity. And of course added complexity increases the chances that a system will fail to behave in the way that you expect, or indeed fail to work at all.
Monitoring systems really should be a couple orders of magnitude more reliable than the things which they monitor. One of the most effective ways to ensure that is by having them be far clearer and simpler; an advantage that cooperative monitoring forgoes.
I currently work for Google. Everyone here uses Google for their searching; it's just so obvious a choice that no one feels obligated to pretend anything else is better.
Before this, I worked for Yahoo. Everyone there used Google for their searching; it was just so obvious a choice that no one felt obligated to pretend that anything else was better.
I seem to recall that Dave Barry had a good line that would extend well to this case:
'...Windows XP, which according to everybody is the "most reliable Windows ever." To me, this is like saying that asparagus is "the most articulate vegetable ever."'
Oh look, Zonk has yet again posted a piece whose "summary" completely fails to say anything about what its central element actually is. It must be a weekday.
I would think that any opinions one expresses here either stand up on their own merits, or don't. Whether there's a name attached to them (especially a "name" of no consequence or permanence) doesn't seem to alter their value as ideas.
I still dislike slashdot's account system; I held out for a long time, only relenting and creating an account because it allowed me to filter out JonKatz. Similarly, I think that the moderation system has done nothing but create a fun game for trolls trying to circumvent it, resulting in far more chaff than if it had never been added at all.
Fines are dangerous to use as a law-enforcement tool, for just this reason. As soon as you give governments a financial incentive to punish people, you start getting "enforcement" that happens for reasons completely unrelated to wanting to protect the public.
I've always thought that the right solution to this is to reduce that governmental body's tax income by exactly as much money as it takes in in fines. This way the government has no financial incentive one way or the other, and will presumably only pass and enforce laws when they're actually in the interest of the community. And those fines would reduce the tax burden on the supposedly-harmed society, reimbursing the citizens who had been transgressed against in the most direct possible way.
Slashdot Mirror
It's important to note that in US law, being a monopoly is not, by itself, illegal. There are, however, laws against several types of anticompetitive behaviour, and having the power of a monopoly means that you are held to a higher standard regarding such behaviours.
So far as I know, no court has examined whether or not ebay is a monopoly. I personally would say they qualify (in light of the extremely strong network effects of the auction broker market), but I'm not a judge.
The sense in which ebay's policy would be most likely to be found illegal, especially as a monopoly, is "bundling": forcing customers to use your non-monopoly product to get access to your monopoly product. This is the way to extend your monopoly beyond its current bounds, which tends to be frowned upon.
No idea yet how that'll play out in this case, though. Even if it ever did come to a trial, resolution would probably be around a decade out. If there's anything that Microsoft has taught us, it's that the judicial system takes about three orders of magnitude too long to effectively stop such predatory practices.
No need to apologize, it's quite relevant.
I think that good, concurrent mac versions are a lot of what have made Blizzard's games so successful. There are literally millions of people out there with modern macs; a nontrivial number of those people have some interest in gaming, and a limited number of options available to them. Being one of a small number of companies willing to cater to them has to be extremely lucrative.
I know that I've been tempted to quit WoW for another game.. but there just aren't any, so I keep paying Blizzard. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are another million or so people in the same boat, which is more players than most games ever see. Blizzard is raking in cash from this underserved market, and I'm kind of surprised that no one else has yet figured this out and decided to get in on it.
Bahahahah! That has got to be the most atrocious company/product/model/version name that I've ever seen.
Take something that might be the chemical formula for oxygen molecules or might not, add an unpronounceable thing that might or might not be an acronym, add on another word that's currently being used by a completely unrelated technology, and top it off with a word that already means either a person or a system call, but never a piece of hardware, and you get a true miracle of impenetrable gibberish. I honestly think that it might be literally impossible to create a worse name.
Uh, as I said, I'm repeating a story that was told to me by a coworker some years back.
Maybe he got it from the jargon file. Maybe he's the one that added it to the jargon file. Maybe it has happened to more than one person. I don't know, but I'd hardly call any of the above plagiarism.
Or perhaps "plagarizing" is something different? (Sorry, it's hard to resist a cheap shot at spelling when someone has jumped right to name-calling.)
Some years ago a colleague told me about the strangest support problem he had ever run into: one of their developers could only log in sitting down.
He had recently noticed that if he tried to log in in any other position (eg, still standing and just quickly checking his mail while walking past his desk), his password was always rejected. But as soon as he sat down, he had no problems getting in.
My colleague at first laughed it off, but it was demonstrated to be the case. He spent a long time looking into cabling problems with the keyboard or network, thinking that perhaps there was a loose connection that only worked reliably with the guy's foot on it or similar longshots. Nothing panned out, and they eventually gave up on it as not important enough to dig into further.
Finally, months later, the developer came back to him, doubled over in laughter, having figured out what the problem was. At some point in the process of cleaning his keyboard, he had reassembled it with a couple of keys juxtaposed. Which never cause him problems, because he touch-typed... when he was sitting in a normal position. When he was standing awkwardly, he looked at the keycaps, and typed his password wrong every time.
According to TFA, they compared phone users to drivers who were at the legal blood-alcohol limit, not those above it. So they have, at most, demonstrated that driving while using a phone is more dangerous than other driving that we consider legal. Obviously there's some level of drunkenness that would be more impairing than phone use; finding out where that point is would be considerably more interesting than what this study actually did examine.
I'd also love to hear more detail about the "hand-free" devices that they used for the test. Were these earpieces, or something more speakerphoneish? I seem to recall another study finding that the problem with driving while using a phone is not having your hands occupied, it's the mental isolation that happens as your brain divides resources between your conversational world and your driving world. And that earpieces did not change this, but that speakerphones _did_.
A sufficiently brutal telco regime might lead to that, but it would be a problematic solution on two fronts:
The first is just that reimplementing a worldwide network would be a huge needless burden. Having copper cabling routed individually to every home in every industrialized nation in the world is an unimaginably huge deal, something that has taken about a century of heavy governmental subsidies to accomplish.
The second is perhaps even more fundamental to the actual problem of bundling content to carrier. You _know_ that within about the first six seconds of telcos charging content providers for access, some big site is going to suggest that instead of paying money, they just make an exclusivity deal. So then you get a world in which {cnn,youtube,ebay,whatever} is _only_ available to {verizon,time warner,whatever} subscribers. At which point the magic telco-alternative is one more leg down.
Remember that cable providers in general are incredibly good at making content-bundling policies that are exactly as burdensome and costly and inconvenient as they can be without driving customers to other alternatives. It's what they're built to do. And I'd really like to not see them do it to the Internet.
When did it suddenly become okay to have "web" "pages" with no actual content at all, just javascript that serves no purpose but to echo html?
So I guess I won't be seeing this list. But I have a pretty clear idea of a site that won't be making my own list of best designed anything ever...
The Bush administration's warrentless spying program is clearly in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act passed in, if I'm remembering correctly, 1971.
You're correct that no court has yet ruled on this issue, but I don't think that it's reasonable to describe its legality as being unknown. By way of example, I think it's far more reasonable to say, "If I were go to out and burn down the nearest post office, that would be illegal" than to say, "Well, I haven't yet been through a trial for burning down this particular post office, so we can't really say whether it's legal or not."
Which seems pretty backward. The government should be held to a higher standard than citizens, not a lower one.
As far as I know, the ad prices are determined entirely by what advertisers bid for them, rather than being rates that Google sets.
Even if you do accept the ad prices as being "evil", it's still not something over which Google has any control, so it seems problematic to use that as an predictor of future evilness.
Yes, it's an atrocity. I actually spent a few seconds glancing at the source and trying to find the real content. (Hint to authors: when your page includes "content.html" in a frame, that's is a sign that everything else is dross.) I finally dug up a content-like page, which... was only the first item in the list. And included a "link" to the next item, which of course failed similarly to work.
The trick of breaking your story up into multiple parts to artificially inflate your hit count is tacky even when your sodding html actually works.
But... those are ID's roots. ID has always been strong on tech expertise and engine optimization, and weak on content, visual design, and gameplay mechanics.
The clearest (and most relevant to this discussion) example is the contrast between Quake and Marathon. Quake had some of the first genuinely 3d-modeled environments and characters, including some incredible details like specular highlights off even your own weapons; the underlying tech was astounding. But it also had extremely simplistic gameplay that rewarded extremely simplistic behaviours (run all the time and shoot all the time), very monotonous visual design, and not even the pretense of plot or backstory.
Conversely, Marathon used 2d sprites for everything that moved. Rockets would always appear dead horizontal as they flew through the air, even if flying almost straight up or down. Running animations constituted cycling through a small handful of different sprites. And yet, it had incredibly fun gameplay mechanics that rewarded many different playstyles, the level design and visual style were brilliant, and there was backstory interesting enough to make you want to stop and read it even while under fire.
I think that ID's decision to focus on making engines on which other companies can build their games was a fantastic one. Engine creation and game creation really are very separate skills, and there's no reason to expect or even want the same group of people to handle both. This allows ID to concentrate on what they do well, game designers to do likewise, and game players to get the best intersection of everyone's abilities.
Completely unrestrained capitalism has a strong tendency toward monopoly. A monopoly is actually a more stable state in a free market than genuine competition is; monopolies are easy to fall into, and very hard to get out of.
Hence the value of regulation to tip markets more toward ongoing competition and away from monopoly. This is unquestionably a worse deal for the most successful corporations, but generally a better deal for consumers. And I know which of those two groups I'd like to win that fight.
Because the model of having content packages bound to ISPs is a step backward.
Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, the early AOL, and all the thousands of bbses out there? Where each one was its own little closed system with its own content, and if you wanted to access anything from them or their users, you needed an account with them?
It was awful, and there's a reason that they all evaporated as soon as the Internet and its dumb-in-the-middle model became available. Where choosing your content and choosing your access provider became separate acts, so you could choose the best of each; rather than needing to decide between, say, a company with unreliable service but access to the content you really want, or a company with reliable service but nothing you really want to use.
Flat access to everything is one of the basic design premises of the Internet, and one of the things that has made us all love it so. Allowing wire monopolists to drag us back to the many-walled-gardens model would be a tragedy.
I'm concerned about the next Google or Yahoo. (Okay, screw the next Microsoft.) What about that great new company that will have an idea for a fantastic new service a couple years from now, but can't afford to pay for the phone and cable companies' protection racket to make it available to users?
And the funny thing is, this is actually most of the problem.
Telcos and cable companies have been so mad for market share that they've continued to cut prices until offering residential data service is actually not profitable for them.
And suddenly now they've noticed that they've got million of subscribers, and they're losing money on every one of them. They "can't" raise prices, because then those unprofitable customers would go somewhere else, which would retroactively invalidate the war they've been waging for years for market share at any cost.
So they've found a third option: charge on the other side as well! Keep losing money on every customer, but make it back up by using that huge customer base as a hammer with which to extort content providers.
This seems like a stunningly clear example of the problematic behaviour of unregulated monopoly. (Okay, duopoly, between your local telco and your local cable co.) It certainly does nothing to change my opinion that completely free-reign capitalism is as problematic as total socialism, and that they right mix is about five parts laissez faire to one part regulation.
This is not correct.
It is absolutely true that snmpd, sar, and whathaveyou count as "agents" as much as anything else. However, you've artificially limited the discussion to only the range of monitoring appraoches that use such tools; of course when you only discuss types of monitoring that use agents, there is no such thing as agentless monitoring.
However, many (and arguably many of the best) monitoring approaches simply observe the behaviour of the actual running services, without using any additional tools on the monitored systems.
eg, want to know whether your webserver is up? Don't rely on a tool running on the webserver machine to look for the process and tell you whether it thinks it's up; just give it a request. Want to know how quickly your webserver serves requests? Just give it the request you care about and time how long the interesting bits of it take. This approach is often referred to as "black box" or "end to end" monitoring, though the latter can be something of a misnomer.
I would argue that such approaches not only exist, they have decided advantages. Asking a tool on a monitored machine whether it is correctly handling requests will never be as authoritative as simply asking it to handle a request and confirming the results.
I'd say that the biggest drawback to the whole category of approaches involving cooperative monitoring is that it adds complexity. And of course added complexity increases the chances that a system will fail to behave in the way that you expect, or indeed fail to work at all.
Monitoring systems really should be a couple orders of magnitude more reliable than the things which they monitor. One of the most effective ways to ensure that is by having them be far clearer and simpler; an advantage that cooperative monitoring forgoes.
I currently work for Google. Everyone here uses Google for their searching; it's just so obvious a choice that no one feels obligated to pretend anything else is better.
Before this, I worked for Yahoo. Everyone there used Google for their searching; it was just so obvious a choice that no one felt obligated to pretend that anything else was better.
I seem to recall that Dave Barry had a good line that would extend well to this case:
'...Windows XP, which according to everybody is the "most reliable Windows
ever." To me, this is like saying that asparagus is "the most articulate
vegetable ever."'
Oh look, Zonk has yet again posted a piece whose "summary" completely fails to say anything about what its central element actually is. It must be a weekday.
I would think that any opinions one expresses here either stand up on their own merits, or don't. Whether there's a name attached to them (especially a "name" of no consequence or permanence) doesn't seem to alter their value as ideas.
I still dislike slashdot's account system; I held out for a long time, only relenting and creating an account because it allowed me to filter out JonKatz. Similarly, I think that the moderation system has done nothing but create a fun game for trolls trying to circumvent it, resulting in far more chaff than if it had never been added at all.
Fines are dangerous to use as a law-enforcement tool, for just this reason. As soon as you give governments a financial incentive to punish people, you start getting "enforcement" that happens for reasons completely unrelated to wanting to protect the public.
I've always thought that the right solution to this is to reduce that governmental body's tax income by exactly as much money as it takes in in fines. This way the government has no financial incentive one way or the other, and will presumably only pass and enforce laws when they're actually in the interest of the community. And those fines would reduce the tax burden on the supposedly-harmed society, reimbursing the citizens who had been transgressed against in the most direct possible way.