It's just a portable personal player. Competitors like Archos have been doing video for ages now. Why is it that every time some little incremental improvement comes out for iPod, people get all giddy over it? I mean it's not like they're doing anything new.
Someone at Aol should read up on some of Clayton Christiansen's (sp?) books regarding disruptive technologies. It appears they've said good riddance to their lower profit customers, all the while ignoring the power users:
- Those who want control of their internet. Those that don't want to be blocked (by feature and by port) from using third-party mail programs such as Outlook.
- Those low-profit customers who want broadband. Yes we know 56K yields a much higher profit margin, but by doing that, they've missed the damn boat! It's an eventuality that everyone will want to use broadband. Who wants to be stuck with an overpriced 56k connection?
- The internet and everything it stands for screams "OPEN". There was a time when Aol was perfect. It provided information and things to do when the internet was barren. No longer. Even MSN has embraced the open internet by porting many of their features to public websites. Yet Aol is still keeping everything closed for members only.
- Bad strategy. The whole point of Aol doing all of the above is to inflict pain on those who want to leave. In business, pain always work better than vitamins. I know because back in '96 I had an Aol dialup account. It was a bitch to dump it and lose my email address, AIM account, community forums, chat rooms, etc. However, I needed to use Outlook. I saw all those things that were exclusive to Aol becoming widely available for free on the internet. At almost $24/month, it became unbearable after a while, and I dumped it. Never looking back again.
I have to say, Aol is the one company that, when someone leaves, they will almost never re-join. That tells you something is seriously wrong with their business plan.
Incorrect. Human nature thirsts for knowledge and understanding of our world. Scientific research has led us to evolutionism. Science is not biased. You come in neutral and let the evidence guide you.
Religion, on the other hand, says you must believe in something blindly, and no matter what evidence is shown to you to contradict it, it is always false.
Science is about learning. Religion is about recruiting and brainwashing.
Unfortunately you are wrong. Religion revolves around the concept of "faith". Faith is the antithesis of logic and learning. Once you accept it, no matter what evidence is put forward to you, you must still hold steadfast to that faith. It is blind and it is unyielding.
So, you can prove the entire universe to them and they still wouldn't believe you.
That's the thing with creationists. They find 1000 ways to interpret their bible, to suit their needs. Truth should be non-evolving and absolute. If one were to not take such a book literally and instead take it metaphorically, then there would "literally" be a way to interpret the book to justify ANY actions you wish, such as killing (eye for an eye), killing of gays, etc etc.
A common perversion of religious people is to twist the arguments of those who favor science and logic.
There's a HUGE difference between saying there's no clear evidence pointing to the existence of god, vs. saying god does not exist because of lack of evidence.
The burden of proof lies in those who proclaim the existence of god.
And no, science isn't a "religion". To malign the most basic form of human intelligience and logic, by comparing it with "faith", is rather ludicrous. One is based on learning and refining by evidence and logic. The other is based on total ignorance and acceptance of something without questioning any of it.
This type of bug is very minor. I never trust what the status bar says on mouse-over of a link. With a little bit of javascript, it's easy to have it say whatever you want. Many sites already employ this. All it does is annoy me.
The bottom line is, once you land on the site, what does it say in the address bar and the status bar then?
One other thing, be careful of misleading domains that replace "1" with an "l" or vice versa.
The real problem I see, with many of these ideas, is not that they weren't good. It's that too much money was thrown into starting up a company based on a pipe dream that it will be worth 100 times what it's real-life true worth will really be.
When you throw $100 million dollars of venture capital on a business that really requires only $5 million, what you end up with is a bunch of antsy investors who can't wait for the return on their investment. Many of these companies had sustainable businesses that could have perhaps become $5 million/year businesses.
However 3 things can kill it:
1) The huge amount of capital. The company managers obvious will find some reason to spend it, and it's usually done on really stupid things, like paying $80/CPM to serve up some ad banners that yielded something like 0.3% click through. It was just one scam after another. People spent money unnecessarily, and companies charged exhorbitant fees for ridiculous things.
2) The return on investment is obviously no longer there, when you plunk down $100 million to yield a business making perhaps $5 million a year. If the initial investment had been $5 million, it would've been a GREAT startup.
3) Expectation of a fast exit strategy that will yield a huge payday. This type of mentality led to really sloppy and poor planning, in terms of resources and commitment. Everyone went in with the expectation that they come out multi-millionaires. This is just not realistic. Any time you start a business you have to be ready to run it for the long-term.
Obviously, there were some really zainy ideas, but I'm only talking about the ones I thought actually had potential.
The only thing these guys are selling is thin air. There are already about 100+ tlds out there (random guess). Why we need more is beyond me.
But of course, these guys are charging people up the a$$ for merely managing dns servers. Don't fall for the hype. Your domain will NOT BE WORTH ANYTHING unless you have a.com/net/org!!!!
Plus, imagine trying to build a business on a non-dot-com domain. Your traffic will just leak to the dot-com version, giving your competitor free advertising.
This is getting really lame. In 1998 when CORE was gonna release all those tlds (which never came about) it was sort of interesting. Now it's just the same old same old.
I just got scammed out of a thousand dollars from a crook who used a stolen "verified" Paypal account to pay me. When I saw the payment to be legit I let the guy pick up the merchandize from my house.
A few hours later the item was charged back by Paypal saying it was unauthroized.
Have a question for you guys. What are my chances to find Paypal liable for the loss if I can't find this crook?
Here's my take:
One is that Paypal sees themselves as an escrow service. If such is the case they have the right to intervene and take back funds from transactions that are deemed illegitimate. However if so, then they also have an obligation to ensure that account charges are in fact legit. The only reason I accepted the payment was that it was from a "verified paypal user". Therefore Paypal is liable.
The other argument would be that Paypal isn't an escrow service, but only a payment transfer service. If this is the case, once the money is in my account it belongs to me (like a cash exchange). They have no right to take it out of my account and put it back.
I've seen way too many programmers who think they're the world's greatest gift to mankind, but don't know the FIRST RULE of developing web applications:
NEVER TRUST USER INPUT
This leads to stupid hacks like sql injection, html injection (leads to XSS), etc etc.
Not saying this is how it happened, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this is how it happened.
If they give a few % points in market share to alternate browsers, but keep enough power where they can still limit the shares, then it might get the DOJ off their backs in the future.
phpMyFAQ is a nice package, but after installing it and playing with it, it's just not the solution I need.
The biggest thing I didn't like was that I couldn't turn off user submissions nor that user help links. I'm looking to create a FAQ system, not have users send in tons of requests for help, or to add content.
That's a lame bullying tactic. I would not condone such. If a news site wants Google to stop listing their news stories, they should comply, but not at the expense of getting kicked out of google completely.
What are you suggesting is akin to Microsoft bullying vendors into bundling IE and preventing competing browsers from being installed.
I knew then as I do now, that it was just an excuse to keep on pirating music, same as the nonsense bit about musicians not getting enough of a cut. You think these guys actually give a rat's a$$ about the musicians? LMAO
It's all just bull$hit. They complain about how huge corporations bully and lie to get what they want. Well well, looks like the "little" guys are just as bad.
Problem with this is that these domain registrars like to use alternative domains to contact their customers. Godaddy uses supportwebsite.com for all inquiries, and Network Solutions, well they've got aliase domains up the wazoo.
VOIP intrigues me, but being a newbie at this, I still get a little dizzy by all of this. So perhaps if someone can enlighten me.:)
Ok so I install this thing on a Linux server. Then what? How do I make calls to say, someone in New York from LA? And who would I have to pay still? No one?
Also, how would I interface my phone with this thing? Would I need to get a VOIP phone?
In that case neither one should be president. In fact most if not ALL past presidents, according to you are unfit presidents. After all they all say they pray, and often talk about god to the American people.
Personally I don't think they're all religious. Many just pretend to be, in order to get the support of religious nuts. But that's politics.
I'd love to one day see a president hopeful openly declare that he is agnostic. Better yet declare he's Buddhist or some other non-Christian believer.
The world is full of idiots that talk without realizing all of the consequences. This is why our representative democracy works. We have some core principles and priorities. We represent people who are much smarter and experienced than we are, so that they can carry out and fight for what the most important in our lives.
To say get rid of copyright laws completely is a complete backwards step, bringing us back into last century.
Slashdot Mirror
You're here on Slashdot. You're not supposed to get any sex. :)
BIG FRIGGING DEAL!!!
It's just a portable personal player. Competitors like Archos have been doing video for ages now. Why is it that every time some little incremental improvement comes out for iPod, people get all giddy over it? I mean it's not like they're doing anything new.
People are like sheep. Follow the crowds. Yippy.
Someone at Aol should read up on some of Clayton Christiansen's (sp?) books regarding disruptive technologies. It appears they've said good riddance to their lower profit customers, all the while ignoring the power users:
- Those who want control of their internet. Those that don't want to be blocked (by feature and by port) from using third-party mail programs such as Outlook.
- Those low-profit customers who want broadband. Yes we know 56K yields a much higher profit margin, but by doing that, they've missed the damn boat! It's an eventuality that everyone will want to use broadband. Who wants to be stuck with an overpriced 56k connection?
- The internet and everything it stands for screams "OPEN". There was a time when Aol was perfect. It provided information and things to do when the internet was barren. No longer. Even MSN has embraced the open internet by porting many of their features to public websites. Yet Aol is still keeping everything closed for members only.
- Bad strategy. The whole point of Aol doing all of the above is to inflict pain on those who want to leave. In business, pain always work better than vitamins. I know because back in '96 I had an Aol dialup account. It was a bitch to dump it and lose my email address, AIM account, community forums, chat rooms, etc. However, I needed to use Outlook. I saw all those things that were exclusive to Aol becoming widely available for free on the internet. At almost $24/month, it became unbearable after a while, and I dumped it. Never looking back again.
I have to say, Aol is the one company that, when someone leaves, they will almost never re-join. That tells you something is seriously wrong with their business plan.
Incorrect. Human nature thirsts for knowledge and understanding of our world. Scientific research has led us to evolutionism. Science is not biased. You come in neutral and let the evidence guide you.
Religion, on the other hand, says you must believe in something blindly, and no matter what evidence is shown to you to contradict it, it is always false.
Science is about learning. Religion is about recruiting and brainwashing.
Unfortunately you are wrong. Religion revolves around the concept of "faith". Faith is the antithesis of logic and learning. Once you accept it, no matter what evidence is put forward to you, you must still hold steadfast to that faith. It is blind and it is unyielding.
So, you can prove the entire universe to them and they still wouldn't believe you.
That's the thing with creationists. They find 1000 ways to interpret their bible, to suit their needs. Truth should be non-evolving and absolute. If one were to not take such a book literally and instead take it metaphorically, then there would "literally" be a way to interpret the book to justify ANY actions you wish, such as killing (eye for an eye), killing of gays, etc etc.
A common perversion of religious people is to twist the arguments of those who favor science and logic.
There's a HUGE difference between saying there's no clear evidence pointing to the existence of god, vs. saying god does not exist because of lack of evidence.
The burden of proof lies in those who proclaim the existence of god.
And no, science isn't a "religion". To malign the most basic form of human intelligience and logic, by comparing it with "faith", is rather ludicrous. One is based on learning and refining by evidence and logic. The other is based on total ignorance and acceptance of something without questioning any of it.
"I am superman. Accept that by faith."
This type of bug is very minor. I never trust what the status bar says on mouse-over of a link. With a little bit of javascript, it's easy to have it say whatever you want. Many sites already employ this. All it does is annoy me.
The bottom line is, once you land on the site, what does it say in the address bar and the status bar then?
One other thing, be careful of misleading domains that replace "1" with an "l" or vice versa.
The real problem I see, with many of these ideas, is not that they weren't good. It's that too much money was thrown into starting up a company based on a pipe dream that it will be worth 100 times what it's real-life true worth will really be.
When you throw $100 million dollars of venture capital on a business that really requires only $5 million, what you end up with is a bunch of antsy investors who can't wait for the return on their investment. Many of these companies had sustainable businesses that could have perhaps become $5 million/year businesses.
However 3 things can kill it:
1) The huge amount of capital. The company managers obvious will find some reason to spend it, and it's usually done on really stupid things, like paying $80/CPM to serve up some ad banners that yielded something like 0.3% click through. It was just one scam after another. People spent money unnecessarily, and companies charged exhorbitant fees for ridiculous things.
2) The return on investment is obviously no longer there, when you plunk down $100 million to yield a business making perhaps $5 million a year. If the initial investment had been $5 million, it would've been a GREAT startup.
3) Expectation of a fast exit strategy that will yield a huge payday. This type of mentality led to really sloppy and poor planning, in terms of resources and commitment. Everyone went in with the expectation that they come out multi-millionaires. This is just not realistic. Any time you start a business you have to be ready to run it for the long-term.
Obviously, there were some really zainy ideas, but I'm only talking about the ones I thought actually had potential.
The only thing these guys are selling is thin air. There are already about 100+ tlds out there (random guess). Why we need more is beyond me.
.com/net/org!!!!
But of course, these guys are charging people up the a$$ for merely managing dns servers. Don't fall for the hype. Your domain will NOT BE WORTH ANYTHING unless you have a
Plus, imagine trying to build a business on a non-dot-com domain. Your traffic will just leak to the dot-com version, giving your competitor free advertising.
This is getting really lame. In 1998 when CORE was gonna release all those tlds (which never came about) it was sort of interesting. Now it's just the same old same old.
Trust me folks. DOT COM is where the action's at.
I agree. It seems all the posts recently are anti-Bush. It's as though the /. owners are trying to brainwash the /. readers.
I just got scammed out of a thousand dollars from a crook who used a stolen "verified" Paypal account to pay me. When I saw the payment to be legit I let the guy pick up the merchandize from my house.
A few hours later the item was charged back by Paypal saying it was unauthroized.
Have a question for you guys. What are my chances to find Paypal liable for the loss if I can't find this crook?
Here's my take:
One is that Paypal sees themselves as an escrow service. If such is the case they have the right to intervene and take back funds from transactions that are deemed illegitimate. However if so, then they also have an obligation to ensure that account charges are in fact legit. The only reason I accepted the payment was that it was from a "verified paypal user". Therefore Paypal is liable.
The other argument would be that Paypal isn't an escrow service, but only a payment transfer service. If this is the case, once the money is in my account it belongs to me (like a cash exchange). They have no right to take it out of my account and put it back.
They also built a "sniffer," through which they could record all communication between users and the server.
READ grasshoppa read!
I've seen way too many programmers who think they're the world's greatest gift to mankind, but don't know the FIRST RULE of developing web applications:
NEVER TRUST USER INPUT
This leads to stupid hacks like sql injection, html injection (leads to XSS), etc etc.
Not saying this is how it happened, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this is how it happened.
Just when you thought that Slashdot articles couldn't get any worse....
If they give a few % points in market share to alternate browsers, but keep enough power where they can still limit the shares, then it might get the DOJ off their backs in the future.
Seems like a plan to me...
Nice link! Thanks!
phpMyFAQ is a nice package, but after installing it and playing with it, it's just not the solution I need.
The biggest thing I didn't like was that I couldn't turn off user submissions nor that user help links. I'm looking to create a FAQ system, not have users send in tons of requests for help, or to add content.
I guess I'll have to look for other scripts.
That's a lame bullying tactic. I would not condone such. If a news site wants Google to stop listing their news stories, they should comply, but not at the expense of getting kicked out of google completely.
What are you suggesting is akin to Microsoft bullying vendors into bundling IE and preventing competing browsers from being installed.
I knew then as I do now, that it was just an excuse to keep on pirating music, same as the nonsense bit about musicians not getting enough of a cut. You think these guys actually give a rat's a$$ about the musicians? LMAO
It's all just bull$hit. They complain about how huge corporations bully and lie to get what they want. Well well, looks like the "little" guys are just as bad.
And exactly how does that discourage the millions of phishing emails that go out every day?
Problem with this is that these domain registrars like to use alternative domains to contact their customers. Godaddy uses supportwebsite.com for all inquiries, and Network Solutions, well they've got aliase domains up the wazoo.
VOIP intrigues me, but being a newbie at this, I still get a little dizzy by all of this. So perhaps if someone can enlighten me. :)
Ok so I install this thing on a Linux server. Then what? How do I make calls to say, someone in New York from LA? And who would I have to pay still? No one?
Also, how would I interface my phone with this thing? Would I need to get a VOIP phone?
In that case neither one should be president. In fact most if not ALL past presidents, according to you are unfit presidents. After all they all say they pray, and often talk about god to the American people.
Personally I don't think they're all religious. Many just pretend to be, in order to get the support of religious nuts. But that's politics.
I'd love to one day see a president hopeful openly declare that he is agnostic. Better yet declare he's Buddhist or some other non-Christian believer.
I agree totally!
The world is full of idiots that talk without realizing all of the consequences. This is why our representative democracy works. We have some core principles and priorities. We represent people who are much smarter and experienced than we are, so that they can carry out and fight for what the most important in our lives.
To say get rid of copyright laws completely is a complete backwards step, bringing us back into last century.