Took a bit of thought to what you said. Wouldn't you be communicating smaller pieces of information on the norm vs huge amounts? Or are you tinking of doing large data translations? Perhaps they were building for one and not the other?
Wrote an entire response and made me rewrite it. Interesting conversation.:)
e-mail and dns, the heavy hitters for a need-to-be reliable service are designed (mostly) as such. I have my backup DNS and Email. Fine. There is no infrastructure to make Jabber as such. Its a great idea, but the problem is that its no longer an instant messenger service say, if your ISP lets the server go down by accident and has an outtage. Everything is a bit more consolidated with AIM (obviously) which forms a good monopoly of sorts. Its good in the sense that its one company making sure everything is fine. No?
I'll admit, its a bad company when it's said, "Fuck you, I'm no longer providing AIM services to you." But think of the bitterness that AOL and non AOL users would have. Think of the uproar that would arise if they even charged for it. It'll be free for a good while longer, so why try and hax0r it, eh? Play nice with them, they play nice with you, everyone is happy, no?
AIM will stay free until AOL tries to provide something better or someone else has a proven solution that will not require everyone to install a server at worst, as well as even hearing of Jabber.
I see what you are saying. It just wasn't very clear to me.
Point being is that AIM is owned by AOL. If you wish to use it, you have to put up with their ads and their client (for Oscar, ignoring Toc). There is no distributed infrastructure like DNS. Well, none that is obvious to us.
As for ad impressions, I never said it covered all costs. Yes, ad's have gone down. AIM is prolly the biggest ad service next to doubleclick, but I don't have numbers. It prolly pays some percentage of their fees, otherwise they wouldn't have it, would they?
Jabber is just like AIM and Gnutella and ICQ, there's just a backbone you have to get on. Gnutella's is just pretty big, the client is part of the backbone. There's one problem with Jabber's infrastrucutre. Its JUST like IRC, its very dependent on people keeping their servers up. Otherwise you can't contact me at sporty@charente.de. What happens if it disappears? Wouldn't I have to run one on my own personal domain just to make sure I'm still around? (sporty@sporty.com?) Otherwise I'm using sporty@jabber.com or something like that.
Depends on how you look at things. AOL, AT&T, MCI MS are all big companies. But look at how all these companies act out towards their customers and other companies. MCI just likes screwing people over left and right. I'd want them shut down asap. MS is the same way. AOL/TW has the DMCA but not much else, don't you agree?
Why, choosing to get an instant messaging account without having to watch AOL advertisements would be as bad as being able to get an ISP without seeing their ads regularly.
You do realise the difference. You pay for your net connection. You don't pay for your AIM connection. By agreeing (indirectly) to view ads, you are funding AIM.
The same happens if you use moviephone (lord I hate their ads). You pay for the phone call to a free service to get movie listings. They make a bit of money from ads in their system.
It's a little big chunk of money that can be used to offset the cost of having the system in place. You pay for the net connection with cash to your isp so that you can connect to a host server who pays money to their isp/uplink so you can use their free service. I'm sure they wouldn't mind if you could provide some alternate service to them where you could be the server.
I think its a fair trade, and AOL is being gracious enough to give you at least ONE outlet to get basic IM working. They can't spend the money to develop AIM for OS/2 v3.0 or Win3.1. Let anyone who cares to develop their own. You really aren't losing much except for idle times and some other non-basic features. Their free product is completely compatable for their free protocol.
"What it costs to them" is the direct result of them choosing a needlessly centralized messaging architecture (in order to make sure that their IM users remain trapped eyeballs), and that's not my problem.
Unless you come up with a better system than a proven centralized one, what can you do. DNS works the same way. There are X amount of root servers who allow others to register.com, verisign.com and a few others to register domains. Point being there has to be some central postoffice for DNS or IM messages to connect to. IRC is the same way. A tree-organized format is hard to get away from since it works so well.
Also, AOL isn't really interferring with your ability to view and send IM's for free. If you don't wanna see their ads, use the TOC protocol.
If you feel its your God given right to use their systems with clients they don't want, then you have right to complain. Unfortunately its not. I'm sure if they see no reason to keep AIM up due to rogue/hacked clients, they'll take it down and I wouldn't blame them. But that's not the case.
They don't HAVE to open up anything. Its their buisness, not God given right.
It would possibly, possibly mind you, unprofitable as they would have to pay AOL for the usage, so what's the point?
Nothing is wrong with buying up other ISP's. Its when you use your leverage to kill off competition.
Uh, the net in its current state can't give everyone an IP.
AIM has the feature to block people.
ICQ was broken to begin with. Its hard to fix. Any wonder why AIM and ICQ aren't one yet? Who wants to try and prevent all the security problems?
Provide a link about the CC thing. I'mm interested in that. And they aren't everything we hate about MS. The only thing I do hate about AOL/TimeWarner is the DMCA, which one other reply to my original post, is prolly good enough reason for Alan Cox to jump ship.
Yes, because they rather you use their own. If they opened up the "good protocol", you realise that people would block out ads and do whatver they want with it, on their largest platforms. Windows and Mac OS (X and 9).
PLUS (..plus mind you), you are using something that they provide for free. No spy-ware, no spam, no nothing. Hell, they ask you your email just so that you can get your old password back. PLUS they give you an EASY route to contact all the "not as smart as everyone necessarily" AOL base without even worrying about e-mail.
So before you critise them, think about what they are giving you, what you are paying for and what it costs to them.
Its evil and good apparently. Let's take a look at the facts.
AOL
* provides free IM
* provides API (though not the nicer one) for writting your own client
* provides us with everything for OSS of Mozilla + opensourcing netscape
Evil
* overzealous marketing
* won't open up oscar
* "you've got mail" - the movie and the sound
* they are a big company, not like MS but not running around buying ISP's
I think people are taking the evil way out of hand.
Perhaps Alan wants to stay a home-spun, I don't need to wear a suit type of guy. That's good for him and all. Just wish people wouldn't assume that we all know what's in his head.
See, you realise, you are of some percentage of unhappy people. I won't even guess at the number. But like Apple, MSN/Quest has a small percentage of people paying a mothly fee for a service. The percentage, though small, and maybe about to jump a few percent-points, adds up to a lot of people who are unfortunately happy.
Am I excusing their behavior? No. The customer no longer comes first because there are many happy and ignorant to the MS-empire-thing customers.
What'd be cool is if we formed some sorta riot with pitchforks and start pokin' MS/Quest people in the eye to improve their service.
It depends. One key thing multi-user systems have which is great is, of course, task switching. Multiple process control. I'm sure that of 10 copies of word running at the same time would run well on a machine that's 10 times powerful than the base, but that's if all 10 copies were maxing out their resources continuously.
Also, If there can be a way of 1 copy in memory of the program/OS itself and multiple copies can be run at the same time without taking up more memory, that would be great too. Sort of like the kernel, it only loads once but services multiple processes. A program that can service multiple users without creating multiple copies.
All in all, maybe 20VM's on a machine 10 times faster might be enough as it doesn't need to scale liniarly unless the machines are completely maxed out. And if the kernel could be loaded in memory once and act as multiple OS's, that'd kick butt too. Sorta like FreeBSD's jail. (Is fbsd the only one to have jail now?)
Right, but there's an advantage of huge stations. Less chance for huge congestion. I mean think of a bus or train system where the stops are too close. It takes forever compared to the express train. Now think of a busy street, and everyone wants to stop every few feet. Traffic stops every few seconds to let someone off. No time to gain speed, no continuous travel. The entire queue becomes like a shopping store check out.
THat's why stations are cool. It forces people to get out and in all at nearly the same time. People holding things up get dirty looks or a black eye;)
I'm gonna explain this as a FreeBSD user. Using a/usr/ports type style, which this Linux distro might use (I didn't read about it, I admit it) makes it all pretty easy. Onmy 200mhz machine, I had a small ascript that would compile and install everything I needed: php, apache, xfree etc etc...
Doing it in real time is insane, but over night isn't so bad.
In NYC, along with the engineer, can shut down an entire car if something is wrong with it while the others are still in service and resolve any stupidities passengers cause.
One problem, there's no conductor. I mean like a guy who is gonna sit there and say "no, don't destroy the inners of the vehicle.
What happens if before I get to my stop, I disable my car somehow and cause congestion? What about the congestion of people just getting in and out of a car serially vs in parallel like a subway does?
Sounds cool, but somehow doesn't. Unless the stations are as big as parking lots and these cars can pass one another, I'm not too into this idea.
Either that or they could get the message that they have a bad format and try something worse. What winds up happening is they see returns up, sales down and can come to not just one conclusion but many:
People really didn't like the music being sold.
People can't play the CD's and can't use them.
People are pirating it.
Perhaps instead of such a simple action, how about actually writing letters to the managers and likes so they can pass the word along? Or simply asking a manager, "WIll this CD play when I take it home." Make them aware of the particular problem instead of the vague one.
Man, the size and weight difference is huge! The only way these devices would kill the iPod is if you dropped them on top of an iPod. And even then you'd have to drop the Rio from a very great height since the fringgin' iPod's are durable.
That makes perfect sense pedermj@peakpeak.com. Problem is that just like in the voting system, there is no entity saying, "risse up and be noticed if you ever want change" committee.
Just a bit of logic to add to your ipod story, mind you, it parks the heads when not in use. The iPod has a cache to support 20 minutes of music (at 128kbps I believe).
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Heh, this only reminded me of the line, "There can be only one!" Then you'd hear the Mortal Kombat theme run in the background :)
Took a bit of thought to what you said. Wouldn't you be communicating smaller pieces of information on the norm vs huge amounts? Or are you tinking of doing large data translations? Perhaps they were building for one and not the other?
Heh, there'll always be a bottle neck.
Wrote an entire response and made me rewrite it. Interesting conversation. :)
e-mail and dns, the heavy hitters for a need-to-be reliable service are designed (mostly) as such. I have my backup DNS and Email. Fine. There is no infrastructure to make Jabber as such. Its a great idea, but the problem is that its no longer an instant messenger service say, if your ISP lets the server go down by accident and has an outtage. Everything is a bit more consolidated with AIM (obviously) which forms a good monopoly of sorts. Its good in the sense that its one company making sure everything is fine. No?
I'll admit, its a bad company when it's said, "Fuck you, I'm no longer providing AIM services to you." But think of the bitterness that AOL and non AOL users would have. Think of the uproar that would arise if they even charged for it. It'll be free for a good while longer, so why try and hax0r it, eh? Play nice with them, they play nice with you, everyone is happy, no?
AIM will stay free until AOL tries to provide something better or someone else has a proven solution that will not require everyone to install a server at worst, as well as even hearing of Jabber.
I see what you are saying. It just wasn't very clear to me.
Point being is that AIM is owned by AOL. If you wish to use it, you have to put up with their ads and their client (for Oscar, ignoring Toc). There is no distributed infrastructure like DNS. Well, none that is obvious to us.
As for ad impressions, I never said it covered all costs. Yes, ad's have gone down. AIM is prolly the biggest ad service next to doubleclick, but I don't have numbers. It prolly pays some percentage of their fees, otherwise they wouldn't have it, would they?
Jabber is just like AIM and Gnutella and ICQ, there's just a backbone you have to get on. Gnutella's is just pretty big, the client is part of the backbone. There's one problem with Jabber's infrastrucutre. Its JUST like IRC, its very dependent on people keeping their servers up. Otherwise you can't contact me at sporty@charente.de. What happens if it disappears? Wouldn't I have to run one on my own personal domain just to make sure I'm still around? (sporty@sporty.com?) Otherwise I'm using sporty@jabber.com or something like that.
Depends on how you look at things. AOL, AT&T, MCI MS are all big companies. But look at how all these companies act out towards their customers and other companies. MCI just likes screwing people over left and right. I'd want them shut down asap. MS is the same way. AOL/TW has the DMCA but not much else, don't you agree?
100% correct, Alan has showed problems with this in the past.
Why, choosing to get an instant messaging account without having to watch AOL advertisements would be as bad as being able to get an ISP without seeing their ads regularly.
You do realise the difference. You pay for your net connection. You don't pay for your AIM connection. By agreeing (indirectly) to view ads, you are funding AIM.
The same happens if you use moviephone (lord I hate their ads). You pay for the phone call to a free service to get movie listings. They make a bit of money from ads in their system.
It's a little big chunk of money that can be used to offset the cost of having the system in place. You pay for the net connection with cash to your isp so that you can connect to a host server who pays money to their isp/uplink so you can use their free service. I'm sure they wouldn't mind if you could provide some alternate service to them where you could be the server.
I think its a fair trade, and AOL is being gracious enough to give you at least ONE outlet to get basic IM working. They can't spend the money to develop AIM for OS/2 v3.0 or Win3.1. Let anyone who cares to develop their own. You really aren't losing much except for idle times and some other non-basic features. Their free product is completely compatable for their free protocol.
"What it costs to them" is the direct result of them choosing a needlessly centralized messaging architecture (in order to make sure that their IM users remain trapped eyeballs), and that's not my problem.
Unless you come up with a better system than a proven centralized one, what can you do. DNS works the same way. There are X amount of root servers who allow others to register.com, verisign.com and a few others to register domains. Point being there has to be some central postoffice for DNS or IM messages to connect to. IRC is the same way. A tree-organized format is hard to get away from since it works so well.
Also, AOL isn't really interferring with your ability to view and send IM's for free. If you don't wanna see their ads, use the TOC protocol.
If you feel its your God given right to use their systems with clients they don't want, then you have right to complain. Unfortunately its not. I'm sure if they see no reason to keep AIM up due to rogue/hacked clients, they'll take it down and I wouldn't blame them. But that's not the case.
They don't HAVE to open up anything. Its their buisness, not God given right.
It would possibly, possibly mind you, unprofitable as they would have to pay AOL for the usage, so what's the point?
Nothing is wrong with buying up other ISP's. Its when you use your leverage to kill off competition.
Uh, the net in its current state can't give everyone an IP.
AIM has the feature to block people.
ICQ was broken to begin with. Its hard to fix. Any wonder why AIM and ICQ aren't one yet? Who wants to try and prevent all the security problems?
Provide a link about the CC thing. I'mm interested in that. And they aren't everything we hate about MS. The only thing I do hate about AOL/TimeWarner is the DMCA, which one other reply to my original post, is prolly good enough reason for Alan Cox to jump ship.
Yes, because they rather you use their own. If they opened up the "good protocol", you realise that people would block out ads and do whatver they want with it, on their largest platforms. Windows and Mac OS (X and 9).
PLUS (..plus mind you), you are using something that they provide for free. No spy-ware, no spam, no nothing. Hell, they ask you your email just so that you can get your old password back. PLUS they give you an EASY route to contact all the "not as smart as everyone necessarily" AOL base without even worrying about e-mail.
So before you critise them, think about what they are giving you, what you are paying for and what it costs to them.
Its evil and good apparently. Let's take a look at the facts.
AOL
* provides free IM
* provides API (though not the nicer one) for writting your own client
* provides us with everything for OSS of Mozilla + opensourcing netscape
Evil
* overzealous marketing
* won't open up oscar
* "you've got mail" - the movie and the sound
* they are a big company, not like MS but not running around buying ISP's
I think people are taking the evil way out of hand.
Perhaps Alan wants to stay a home-spun, I don't need to wear a suit type of guy. That's good for him and all. Just wish people wouldn't assume that we all know what's in his head.
Too bad we just can't blacklist the censors. (/joke)
See, you realise, you are of some percentage of unhappy people. I won't even guess at the number. But like Apple, MSN/Quest has a small percentage of people paying a mothly fee for a service. The percentage, though small, and maybe about to jump a few percent-points, adds up to a lot of people who are unfortunately happy.
Am I excusing their behavior? No. The customer no longer comes first because there are many happy and ignorant to the MS-empire-thing customers.
What'd be cool is if we formed some sorta riot with pitchforks and start pokin' MS/Quest people in the eye to improve their service.
It depends. One key thing multi-user systems have which is great is, of course, task switching. Multiple process control. I'm sure that of 10 copies of word running at the same time would run well on a machine that's 10 times powerful than the base, but that's if all 10 copies were maxing out their resources continuously.
Also, If there can be a way of 1 copy in memory of the program/OS itself and multiple copies can be run at the same time without taking up more memory, that would be great too. Sort of like the kernel, it only loads once but services multiple processes. A program that can service multiple users without creating multiple copies.
All in all, maybe 20VM's on a machine 10 times faster might be enough as it doesn't need to scale liniarly unless the machines are completely maxed out. And if the kernel could be loaded in memory once and act as multiple OS's, that'd kick butt too. Sorta like FreeBSD's jail. (Is fbsd the only one to have jail now?)
Right, but there's an advantage of huge stations. Less chance for huge congestion. I mean think of a bus or train system where the stops are too close. It takes forever compared to the express train. Now think of a busy street, and everyone wants to stop every few feet. Traffic stops every few seconds to let someone off. No time to gain speed, no continuous travel. The entire queue becomes like a shopping store check out.
;)
THat's why stations are cool. It forces people to get out and in all at nearly the same time. People holding things up get dirty looks or a black eye
I'm gonna explain this as a FreeBSD user. Using a /usr/ports type style, which this Linux distro might use (I didn't read about it, I admit it) makes it all pretty easy. Onmy 200mhz machine, I had a small ascript that would compile and install everything I needed: php, apache, xfree etc etc...
Doing it in real time is insane, but over night isn't so bad.
That's ok. If you don't have the IBM super computer, you could always use, dare I say, a Beowulf Cluster? :)
In NYC, along with the engineer, can shut down an entire car if something is wrong with it while the others are still in service and resolve any stupidities passengers cause.
One problem, there's no conductor. I mean like a guy who is gonna sit there and say "no, don't destroy the inners of the vehicle.
What happens if before I get to my stop, I disable my car somehow and cause congestion? What about the congestion of people just getting in and out of a car serially vs in parallel like a subway does?
Sounds cool, but somehow doesn't. Unless the stations are as big as parking lots and these cars can pass one another, I'm not too into this idea.
Agreed 100%, just can't use small actions by themselves since they are too open to interpretation :)
Either that or they could get the message that they have a bad format and try something worse. What winds up happening is they see returns up, sales down and can come to not just one conclusion but many:
People really didn't like the music being sold.
People can't play the CD's and can't use them.
People are pirating it.
Perhaps instead of such a simple action, how about actually writing letters to the managers and likes so they can pass the word along? Or simply asking a manager, "WIll this CD play when I take it home." Make them aware of the particular problem instead of the vague one.
Man, the size and weight difference is huge! The only way these devices would kill the iPod is if you dropped them on top of an iPod. And even then you'd have to drop the Rio from a very great height since the fringgin' iPod's are durable.
That makes perfect sense pedermj@peakpeak.com. Problem is that just like in the voting system, there is no entity saying, "risse up and be noticed if you ever want change" committee.
Perhaps you should write something to copy the ones you want to ramdisk and let the drive auto sleep. OR use dvd-ram or something similar.
Of course
.. you could use junkbuster http://freshmeat.net/projects/internetjunkbuster/
.. use mozilla, you can kill off their cookies and images, there's an option to not download them
Just a bit of logic to add to your ipod story, mind you, it parks the heads when not in use. The iPod has a cache to support 20 minutes of music (at 128kbps I believe).