... while now he may be promising a sub-orbital launch platform and cheap access to space, what he will actually deliver in ten years will be a model rocket powered by five 'D' engines and a really cool paint job.
Doesn't anyone remember Daikatana? How Quake was supposed to be set in an Aztec environment? How, after Carmack left id, they published a press release saying how they will no longer be issuing grand pronouncements about unreleased titles?
I puzzled as to why a school would even implement this policy. Back when I was in college (we learned on rock punch-tape cards like the Flintstones) we used to get together to work through our homework all the time. (I remember calling it quits for the night after I went through few pages of calculations and ended up with a negative resistance.) Is this type of policy common these days?
Really? I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is and post:
- your name, address, age, weight, eye colour, and phone number(s) - your place of employment, title, immediate supervisor and salary - all of your email addresses - all of your bank accounts, with account numbers - all of your credit cards, with numbers and expiry dates - all systems you currently access, with login id's and passwords - all passphrases to any encryption systems you currently use
The notion that 'information in and of itself cannot be dangerous' is ridiculous. Someone else already mentioned bomb-making info, how about names and locations of undercover police officers? The exact formula of the ink used to print money?
Saying that 'information itself is not dangerous' is like saying 'guns themselves aren't dangerous'. Sure - until an unsuitable person picks it up and starts using it inappropriately. Being careless with dangerous information is just like being careless with a loaded gun. You don't leave either laying around.
A package management system is the user's first and best defense against this type of thing. With it, a user can always determine which files are needed for which applications, and vice-versa. You can check what is going to be installed before you do it. While a malicious/ignorant software vendor could put malware into a package file, at least all of the files that make up that package can be determined later on. No other software management system can provide that information as easily. Not installer programs, and not even the sacred install-from-source routine.
"There is no reason to suspect that a bit of cash here and now is going to somehow change the fundamental, underlying economic reality that there aren't many people willing to pay for software which by rights they don't have to pay for."
That is a cold, heartless thing to say. Which, of course, is the business world that Mandrake operates in.
The business world is littered with the corpses of companies who fail to understand one key facet of human nature: People will not pay for something they can obtain a reasonable facsimile thereof for free (or cheaper).
This is why:
* most of the.com's went under
* cheap, adequate technology (ethernet, NT) wins our over expensive, better technology (token ring, Netware) nearly every time.
We can expect more of this. It is going to be very, very, difficult to survive as a pure commercial distribution. Expect these changes:
* ISO downloads to be severely curtailed - bandwidth doesn't grow on trees. The major distibutions will offload as much as they can onto thier mirror sites (good luck to those guys in figuring our how to pay for it)
* The major distributions will become very focused on for-pay services, consulting and non-GPL software. The GPL versions will become viewed as 'loss leaders' and will recieve the appropriate attention and resources from the suits.
The.com's and Linux companies out there have run into the cold, hard screen door called reality, and are learning that TANSTAAFL. As long as banks expect mortgages to be paid and grocery stores expect food to be paid for, people who work for companies expect to be paid in real dollars. The only other long-term alternative is for developers to band together in kind of high-tech communes and code together. It might be an interesting experiment for a communist country to sponsor a Linux distribution. This model has been tried before. Hands up everyone who drives a Lada.
Usenet was designed as a threaded discussion tool. It does a horrible job of transmitting binaries. Between missing parts, reposts and encoding schemes, using usenet to transmit binaries is like using a screwdriver to pound in a nail. There are many different tools that are designed to transmit binary files (ftp, http, p2p, IRC, etc). Use them instead and save yourself a lot of pain.
Anyone who willfully destroys the work of another (commonly called vandalism) deserves to spend some quality time with Bubba at your local criminal processing facility. The fact that this infantile punk is back on the street says more about the justice system than anything else in this case.
Does anyone else find it just a little ironic that this loser is using the Internet (created by government, propagated by corporations), to spew anti-government and anti-corporate rhetoric?
We already have deer season, bear season, elk season. Why not have kitty season and puppy season? Stalking strays through the urban wilderness with a 22-caliber air rifle loaded with darts would be a new challenge for the hunters - and they wouldn't even have to travel!
It costs so much because it's expensive to deliver. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a cable company that wants to provide high-speed Internet services. You'll probably use an ATM switch for your backbone connection - $1.5 - $2 million (US). You'll either need to run fibre optic cable to other cities that you serve to form your backbone, or pay mega-bucks for a peering agreement with an upstream provider. What's that? You mean, you want reliable service? Well, then you're going to have to pony up double for a redundant connection.
Next, you need to fan out the traffic across the entire city that you service. These days you probably would go with Gigabit Ethernet - figure on about $50K (US) per switch. BTW - you will need anywhere from 5 - 20 of them, depending on the market you are in. I guess we are going to have to actually connect them together as well - figure on more fibre.
Well, by now, you have a pile of horrendously expensive equipment, along with a few spools of fibre optic cable. You are going to have to pay someone to install it all for you (unless you can find technicians that work for free. All the ones I've met have this strange obsession with paying the mortgage and feeding their families). You will also need an overpaid network manager to oversee the whole mess once it gets going. What's that? Ah yes - you bring up a very good point. Who do your customers call when they have problems? You can't let them talk the the network manager - he tends to be quite cranky and he'll piss off more customers than he helps (from his viewpoint, the fewer customers, the more bandwidth left for him). You are going to have to put in a call centre, staffed with people who like to spend lots of time on the phone telling other people to reset their cable modems. (A side benefit is that the percentage of attractive people in the call centre population tends to be higher that other occupations, but don't you dare let on that you know this, or you will have legal expenses to add the the list).
There are a few more items to add to your list - like a building to put your people and equipment in, but I hope you get my point. Internet access (fast and slow) is expensive to provide. It requires a much more complex infrastructure to support than the comparatively simple and stupid telephone. The industry is still in the growth phase - meaning that someone is going to have to pay to continuously add expanded capacity to the network. In a free market, capitalist economy, that person would be the customer. (IMHO it's better than the alternative, but that's a different discussion) You can compare this with the phone network, which, for the most part, is past the growth phase and is in the maintenance phase. You phone bill basically goes toward fixing parts of the phone infrastructure that breaks.
A Beowulf cluster of human brains? Aren't those usually called a comittee or a task force? Output would be next to nothing because the individual nodes would be busy arguing with each other. It would turn into an 'information black hole' - consuming and demanding reports about everything in sight, yet producing nothing in result.
On the other hand, they could probably replace upper management at most major corporations.
Lemme get this straight - you're claiming to be burt out, and you haven't even held down your first real job yet?? Get a job, get yourself ten years of experience and after the backs of your ears are dry - THEN we'll talk. You've spent your life thus far cooped up in an artificial environment. Time to discover the real world and find out how things really work.
Bah. The whole antitrust thing in just a distraction from the real issue - closed vs open. Sure, it would have been nice to see M$ take a pounding, but it will be even more satisfying to watch them loose their place of prominence without government interference. Concentrate on the new Nimda worm that is spreading through the net. Concentrate on holding M$ spokedrones responsible for the lies they spread - such as the comment today on how software is handled in RedHat vs Windows. That is where ground can be made.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't anyone remember Daikatana? How Quake was supposed to be set in an Aztec environment? How, after Carmack left id, they published a press release saying how they will no longer be issuing grand pronouncements about unreleased titles?
or, to be more accurate, domain name extortionists. $300 is a little much to start buying up every possible letter combination.
Someone who screams incessantly about something they know nothing about.
I puzzled as to why a school would even implement this policy. Back when I was in college (we learned on rock punch-tape cards like the Flintstones) we used to get together to work through our homework all the time. (I remember calling it quits for the night after I went through few pages of calculations and ended up with a negative resistance.) Is this type of policy common these days?
Really? I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is and post:
- your name, address, age, weight, eye colour, and phone number(s)
- your place of employment, title, immediate supervisor and salary
- all of your email addresses
- all of your bank accounts, with account numbers
- all of your credit cards, with numbers and expiry dates
- all systems you currently access, with login id's and passwords
- all passphrases to any encryption systems you currently use
The notion that 'information in and of itself cannot be dangerous' is ridiculous. Someone else already mentioned bomb-making info, how about names and locations of undercover police officers? The exact formula of the ink used to print money?
Saying that 'information itself is not dangerous' is like saying 'guns themselves aren't dangerous'. Sure - until an unsuitable person picks it up and starts using it inappropriately. Being careless with dangerous information is just like being careless with a loaded gun. You don't leave either laying around.
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/soydangers.htm
Raises your estrogen levels, which causes loss of muscle tissue and development of feminine features. (not covered in the above article)
(But hey - if you're into man-breasts, be my guest)
A package management system is the user's first and best defense against this type of thing. With it, a user can always determine which files are needed for which applications, and vice-versa. You can check what is going to be installed before you do it. While a malicious/ignorant software vendor could put malware into a package file, at least all of the files that make up that package can be determined later on. No other software management system can provide that information as easily. Not installer programs, and not even the sacred install-from-source routine.
That is a cold, heartless thing to say. Which, of course, is the business world that Mandrake operates in.
The business world is littered with the corpses of companies who fail to understand one key facet of human nature:
.com's went under
People will not pay for something they can obtain a reasonable facsimile thereof for free (or cheaper).
This is why:
* most of the
* cheap, adequate technology (ethernet, NT) wins our over expensive, better technology (token ring, Netware) nearly every time.
We can expect more of this. It is going to be very, very, difficult to survive as a pure commercial distribution. Expect these changes:
* ISO downloads to be severely curtailed - bandwidth doesn't grow on trees. The major distibutions will offload as much as they can onto thier mirror sites (good luck to those guys in figuring our how to pay for it)
* The major distributions will become very focused on for-pay services, consulting and non-GPL software. The GPL versions will become viewed as 'loss leaders' and will recieve the appropriate attention and resources from the suits.
The .com's and Linux companies out there have run into the cold, hard screen door called reality, and are learning that TANSTAAFL. As long as banks expect mortgages to be paid and grocery stores expect food to be paid for, people who work for companies expect to be paid in real dollars. The only other long-term alternative is for developers to band together in kind of high-tech communes and code together. It might be an interesting experiment for a communist country to sponsor a Linux distribution. This model has been tried before. Hands up everyone who drives a Lada.
Thought so.
It says that one respects human life and the other doesn't.
Usenet was designed as a threaded discussion tool. It does a horrible job of transmitting binaries. Between missing parts, reposts and encoding schemes, using usenet to transmit binaries is like using a screwdriver to pound in a nail. There are many different tools that are designed to transmit binary files (ftp, http, p2p, IRC, etc). Use them instead and save yourself a lot of pain.
Does anyone else find it just a little ironic that this loser is using the Internet (created by government, propagated by corporations), to spew anti-government and anti-corporate rhetoric?
We already have deer season, bear season, elk season. Why not have kitty season and puppy season? Stalking strays through the urban wilderness with a 22-caliber air rifle loaded with darts would be a new challenge for the hunters - and they wouldn't even have to travel!
It costs so much because it's expensive to deliver. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a cable company that wants to provide high-speed Internet services. You'll probably use an ATM switch for your backbone connection - $1.5 - $2 million (US). You'll either need to run fibre optic cable to other cities that you serve to form your backbone, or pay mega-bucks for a peering agreement with an upstream provider. What's that? You mean, you want reliable service? Well, then you're going to have to pony up double for a redundant connection.
Next, you need to fan out the traffic across the entire city that you service. These days you probably would go with Gigabit Ethernet - figure on about $50K (US) per switch. BTW - you will need anywhere from 5 - 20 of them, depending on the market you are in. I guess we are going to have to actually connect them together as well - figure on more fibre.
Well, by now, you have a pile of horrendously expensive equipment, along with a few spools of fibre optic cable. You are going to have to pay someone to install it all for you (unless you can find technicians that work for free. All the ones I've met have this strange obsession with paying the mortgage and feeding their families). You will also need an overpaid network manager to oversee the whole mess once it gets going. What's that? Ah yes - you bring up a very good point. Who do your customers call when they have problems? You can't let them talk the the network manager - he tends to be quite cranky and he'll piss off more customers than he helps (from his viewpoint, the fewer customers, the more bandwidth left for him). You are going to have to put in a call centre, staffed with people who like to spend lots of time on the phone telling other people to reset their cable modems. (A side benefit is that the percentage of attractive people in the call centre population tends to be higher that other occupations, but don't you dare let on that you know this, or you will have legal expenses to add the the list).
There are a few more items to add to your list - like a building to put your people and equipment in, but I hope you get my point. Internet access (fast and slow) is expensive to provide. It requires a much more complex infrastructure to support than the comparatively simple and stupid telephone. The industry is still in the growth phase - meaning that someone is going to have to pay to continuously add expanded capacity to the network. In a free market, capitalist economy, that person would be the customer. (IMHO it's better than the alternative, but that's a different discussion) You can compare this with the phone network, which, for the most part, is past the growth phase and is in the maintenance phase. You phone bill basically goes toward fixing parts of the phone infrastructure that breaks.
A Beowulf cluster of human brains? Aren't those usually called a comittee or a task force? Output would be next to nothing because the individual nodes would be busy arguing with each other. It would turn into an 'information black hole' - consuming and demanding reports about everything in sight, yet producing nothing in result.
On the other hand, they could probably replace upper management at most major corporations.
You Debian guys are starting to sound like the Mac users of the Linux world.
No, No, No.
It's Mentally Challenged Slave of the Empire
Ugh. I thought it was ugly.
...
Perhaps it's because I've seen that same 'naked-woman' silouette on the mudflaps of too many redneck pickup trucks
Lemme get this straight - you're claiming to be burt out, and you haven't even held down your first real job yet?? Get a job, get yourself ten years of experience and after the backs of your ears are dry - THEN we'll talk. You've spent your life thus far cooped up in an artificial environment. Time to discover the real world and find out how things really work.
Bah. The whole antitrust thing in just a distraction from the real issue - closed vs open. Sure, it would have been nice to see M$ take a pounding, but it will be even more satisfying to watch them loose their place of prominence without government interference. Concentrate on the new Nimda worm that is spreading through the net. Concentrate on holding M$ spokedrones responsible for the lies they spread - such as the comment today on how software is handled in RedHat vs Windows. That is where ground can be made.
Quake - great graphics engine, lousy game.
Quake doesn't get interesting until someone who actually knows how to write a game uses it for thier graphic engine.
All I can say is a heartfelt 'AMEN' to that.
So you see animal testing as unethical, but you have no problems with human testing?
yeah, but with the quality of beer they have there, you won't want to.
" ...whose labor pains keep giving us new tarballs"
...
You can get medication for that you know
Gaz, happily surfing without ads, java or javascript since 1997 (posted with Netscape 3). Missing nothing that appeals to anyone over 12. CSS ???