Atheletes who accept endorsements (which make it possible for them to realize their dreams of testing the limits of humanity's physical potential), are not selling their souls.
You're telling me the "official" laws of physics somehow follow the Olympic venues around the world? I couldn't break a world record at some other place?
Oh, you meant to say, "...possible to realize their dreams of participatiing in the world's most televised -- and most heavily endorsed -- sporing event."
Look, if these athletes were up-front and simply say, "I'm in it for the money and glory", I wouldn't be so caustic about this whole issue. The entire pretense of noble grandure associated with these athletes just kills me!
When you grow up, you may learn that all this commerce is what makes civilization possible.
Yeah, and if you belive the commercials, commerce fights terrorism, too. Be patriotic and buy a Ford Explorer!:)
People of all nations gather all the time, whether to compete in sports, watch for UFOs in Nevada, or present scientific papers at USENIX. Though our nations as a whole may not get along, most of us in those countries are reasonable people and get along just fine. So there is no inherent goodness to this aspect of the Olympics.
While I can't possibly identify with the obsessive-compulsive desire to devote one's entire life to compete in a sport (WTF is it with this whole "sponsorship" thing, anyway?), I can respect such a person's talent and decision.
However, when these people bow to the forces that be and (for example) don't publish their own diaries on their own competitions, I lose respect for them. They should, in front of the cameras -- the world -- cast off the leash. But none do. Why? It's for the fame. They could go elsewhere to compete, but they simply don't.
So, you see, it's not that the IOC and Nike and Ford are the only evil Olympic forces. The athletes themselves knowingly sell their own souls.
If there are any cases that seen an actual judgement (not settlement) in favor of a plaintiff against a software company for damages done by faulty software, please enlighten me with references.
Not only is the spirit of the games gone (if it was ever there), the residents of the hosting locale get the shaft, too.
I live in Salt Lake. As a citizen, I don't mind the world "shitting in my backyard" -- I'm no xenophobe and I welcome diversity. However, as a taxpayer, I've been quite outraged by most of the crap that's gone on these past few of years.
There's too much to bitch about, but my personal favorite was the $450,000 spent to give every bloody city employee an official 2002 Winter Games jacket.
Then there's all the cloak-and-dagger security bullshit going on around here. I work at the Univerity of Utah, and I'm working from home for most of February because it's too damned tough to get to campus! There's 3 black military choppers constantly flying overhead. A guy I work with was accosted by the Secret Service. He's foreign -- looks and sounds foreign -- and made the mistake of biking up to the hill overlooking the stadium to take a few digital snapshots. He was questioned, his pictures were deleted, and he was released.
Meanwhile, all of the on/off ramps into the city are totally un-guarded. Mostly industrial areas, the lots underneath these bridges are perfect places to park large trucks (which is normal anyway) full of explosives. I guess nobody cares about the mere visitors to Salt Lake -- only the corporate sponsors at the venues.
And what's it all for? So Budwiser and Nike can pimp their wares without any trouble. You really think that if this many people gathered for a non-commercial event (a protest perhaps), that they'd enforce a 45-mile radius no-fly zone around the event? No fucking way. This is all about selling stuff, people. I just feel bad for the businesses downtown that are effectly shut down due to the strict security perimeter.
If you want to read some independent local SLC journalism, I encourage you to read the City Weekly: http://www.avenews.com/index.html
Yeah -- I'm bitter. The TV in my house will be off for the month of February. The networks won't be getting my eyeballs (they lost them at Sydney).
The point is, you DO get what you pay for. If you think GnuPG is better than Phil Zimmermans PGP by all means go with it, but why not just do what most corporations do and pay for software that comes with a support contract?
Rubbish! Following the herd mentality of corporate america may be smart in the political aspects of business (so is knowing how to golf, but that's just as lame...), but not necessarily in the technical aspects.
Yes, you get what you pay for -- an unreasonable EULA and company that tells you "you're s.o.l." if anything should go wrong enough to cause your business damage, all for the yearly support cost of what could likely pay for a competent admin to deal with the software in-house. At least with GPL'd software, there's no pretense of accountability.
As for the techical comparison to PGP, I don't have the ability to evaluate code myself, so I must rely on those who care about security and have the ability to digest source code. To this end, if GPG support is good enough for users of Mixmaster anonymous remailers (these are some truly smart and paranoid folk) and for the OpenBSD maintaners, I'd have to say its okay for my needs.
And I'm pretty certain that GPG supports more algorithms than PGP, and you can be 100% certain that the out-of-the-box algorithms in GPG are not hindered by patents or license restrictions.
Just read this for how much responsibility software companies have to their paying customers.
sI'd counter that it's the corps that cause the world to suck. If I could get decent up- *and* down-stream speeds, I'd behave in a heartbeat.
If I weren't moving soo, I'd switch *back* to Qwest (ugh!) and get slower DSL so I could get *faster* upstream.
Right now I get 1.5mbps down and 128kbps up. If I had the option of paying the same rate, but getting, say 512k/512k, I'd do it in a heartbeat. You how shitty the latency is on a SSH session when it's sharing a 128k upstream pipe with a data upload? It's close to unusable!
I know that switches and routers *can* custom-fit each connection, so if I want 512/512 and Foo wants 128/3.0mb, it can happen. The problem is that they don't offer it and thereby cripple us otherwise non abusive subscribers.
Simple as that. I know lots of people that download stuff more or less 24/7 "just because they can" or even more stupid "because they pay for it anyways".
I'm one of those users. I'm sick of AT&T limiting my upstream to 128kbs, upping my rates by $5 every 6 months, and cutting my d/l speed in half when @Home went under.
So, to "protest" I'm gonna take all the pipe I can get. I have a "wget -m local-kernel-mirror" going in the background at all times.
Yeah, I might be seen as a prick, but AT&T has the cash to not be such assholes when it comes to their rates and bandwidth policies. Screw-em.
I used to work for a small point-of-sale company. We had one programmer who's entire purpose in life was to do data conversions. If the competing company wouldn't open up their file format, he'd tear it apart in order to import our customer's existing data into our own system.
Sometimes it was even simpler: tell the old software to dump a full report to text file, massage with your own tools, then re-import into the new app.:)
I never heard of any legal scuffles as a result. And we'd often release (to customers) small utilities that would do the conversions.
I mean, there's an entire class of software devoted to pulling data from various closed formats. Given the extensive lists of some (I can't recall any names right now), I find it hard to believe they "licensed" the right to read those file formats from every single company.
On a related note, there are 2 apps that I'd love to see on Linux, but only have Windows versions. The first is the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Edition on CD-ROM, and the other is that huge CD-ROM collection from National Geographic that spans from 1888-2000 (or there abouts). Quite a project, to be sure, and I've always wondered myself if I'd catch hell if I ever figured out the DB structures and released the code to the OSS community.
Now, sure there's some old dumb terminal shops like City of Largo, but after the last 20 years of the PC revolution (which has been almost entirely proprietary client software), they are getting harder and harder to find.
Wrong -- there are tons out there.
My prior job was working for a small point-of-sale software company which catered to the lumber and building materials industry. You think these shops want to place a $1000 PC out on the warehouse floor? Nope, they use $300 dumb terminals. Much more durable and less to configure. RS-232 is still very much alive today, and I can't really forsee its demise in my lifetime. I'm sure there are many similar vertical markets with the same requirements.
Initially, the software was really propriety: written in Business BASIC running on something called SuperDOS. From the point of view of a Unix/NT admin, this was the most disgusting environment I'd ever encountered.:) But then they went to another BASIC environment which ran on SCO (yuck!) and AIX (not too bad). I now hear that linux is making inroads, displacing SCO, NT, and AIX.
Not that this has anything to do with the desktop environment, though. I simply had to refute the claim that dumb terminals are on their way out.
Let me set the tone by saying that I am a card-carrying NRA member, and have been for 3 years now. I do feel that the disarming of the Australians, the British, and soon the Canadians is a damn shame. And I'm well aware of the forces that would do the same to us in the US (except Kalifornia -- it's has aleady been taken).
There used to be a cartoon at geekswithguns.org that portrayed 3 or 4 terrorists on an airplane, apologetically making excuses for their possesion of box cutters to a mob of angry and armed passengers. The caption read something like, "What may have happened on Sep. 11 if this were truly the land of the free." I agree with that cartoon 100%.
However... the no-guns-and-pricey-broadband thing really is tasteless, guys.
To imply that people should take up arms for something as silly as broadbad just trivializes the concept of an armed citizenry. And, frankly, I'm ashamed of my fellow Americans here at/. who would so quickly (even in jest) make this comment.
If more of our fellow countrymen were more self-sustaining, I truly believe this world would be a far better place.
Our current culture breeds indifference to our fellow man and dependence on multi-billion dollar multinational corps.
I've seen too many documentaries where "civilization" encroaching on some simpler peoples draws away the youth, until the culture all but dissapears. Is this progress?
Do you really think the US would be a bad place to live is the majority lived like modern-day Amish?
My wife and I have been researching this stuff for 2 solid years. We have our breeds of different types of animals picked out (chickens, goats, miniature cows and pigs), crops to best suit the southwest climate we'll be living in, and a solar array and wind turbine.
Our income will be very little, by design. I do plan on a symbolic year of absolutely no income, so the Man will end up writing me a check come tax return time. (Earned income credit is a wonderful thing!) We'll sell surplus offspring (angora goats go for a pretty penny, as do miniature cows), barter with eggs and cheese, and other excess we have (but not relying on it). I'll do freelance work as a consultant, if the desire or need arises. Of course, we'll be going into this will a little savings for rainy day.
Check out Lehman's for all sorts of non-electric stuff.
We're no Luddites, but we realize our lives can be so much more with so much less than we have now.
Is there a good (and dumbed-down) history of when and why we went from a mostly autonomous agrarian society to an industrialized and service-based one?
As someone who has purchased 20 acres out in the sticks, and plans on being damned near self-sufficient in the near future, I always wonder why our society is so screwed up in this respect. The only people who seem to benefit in our current system is (you guessed it) big business and the wealthy. The rest will be purpetual wage slaves
I plan to give up a confortable middle-class income for the peace of mind that comes from providing for one's self, far before retirement age. I will work when I feel like it -- I don't think I'll ever want to totally leave the computer field -- and I'll barter as much as I can.
There is the option, however, to cancel a download mid stream without depleting your download count.
Wasn't there something called "leech zmodem" back in the BBS days? This version of zmodem would abort the download at the very last byte, so as to fool the BBS's upload/download ratio tracking.
I bet something like this will make the rounds when Pay Napster comes online.
...bottom line is someone walks into a store and sees the iMac sitting there for $1400 next to a PC for $699. Both run Office. Both access the 'net. Both play music. Both can probably edit video to a limited extent.
... bottom line is someone walks into a camera store and sees a Hasenblad sitting there for $2000 next to a Nikon for $300. Both take film. Both take pictures....
Niche market, my friend. If you build it, they will come.
If any of you wouldn't want the net wealth of Steve Jobs, please raise your hand.
(sound of crickets)
Thank you.
The fact is, even with huge players in market (or a monopoloy), smaller niche competitors can thrive. It's ok to tout your coolness factor. Who cares if stuffy business suits don't trust your coolness! To hell with 'em, I say.
Granted, Jobs may in fact be the anti-christ everyone says he is, but he's doing quite fine for himself, don't you think?
And one thing Katz forgets: those conservative baby boomers have... kids who want "cool" technology. This is not a market to brush off so easily!
I once worked for a company that was a Miscrosoft Solutions Provider (or something like that). In addition to being required to have at least 2 Microsoft Certified Professionals (we had 4 MCSEs in-house), we got to pay a hefty fine^H^H^Hee for the privilege of using the MSP logo on our cards and plaque in the office.
We also got to buy some sort of really good licensing deal. For like $1000, we got 10 copies of damned near everything: WinNT, Office, SQL, Exchange, etc. I guess the idea was to let us play with the software, so we could peddle it more effectively.
Well, we eventually merged with another company. They were truly anal about software licensing, so we tried to do the proper self-audit.
We couldn't sort out the exact meaning of the 10-pack deal I mentioned earlier, so we called the local Microsoft branch and asked if the license we had purchased accounted for X many copies we were using.
Nobody at M$ could give us a straight answer about the licensing. We finally gave up after a few weeks of emails and calls. We figured that if were really were auditted, we'd throw the paper trail of attempted compliance back at them.
My favorite is the Redhat Kickstart version.:)
I have a boot disk that configures a syslog server. One for a dns server. Etc. One size fits all, really. You can make as lean or fat a server you need to.
As a fellow MCSE (NT 4.0 + Internet), I can't see how linux is a "massive" configuration any more than NT is. Most distros give you a nice GUI interface for configuration -- if you want it.
Personally, I've never understood the need to drive a VGA monitor for a server OS. All I need is terminal access and vi.
Seriously, though, there quite a few floppy-based specailized linux distros (router, firewall, etc.). I haven't come across much more.
Is current IM real-time? I got the impression that users received a complete message in one pop -- kinda like MUDs, etc. With talk, it was more like a phone conversation, where both could talk at the same time.
Is IM really that great a thing? I've never had the desire/need to try it out.
I still prefer pine for email, trn for usenet, gnut for gnutella, and ncftp for ftp. I get annoyed when people email me attachements -- I'd prefer a URL.
The thought of everyone and their dog wisking voice and video at me kinda bugs me. Whatever happened to the "talk" command?
I'm only 29 and I'm starting to feel like that "condescending unix computer user" in Dilbert.:)
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You're telling me the "official" laws of physics somehow follow the Olympic venues around the world? I couldn't break a world record at some other place?
Oh, you meant to say, "...possible to realize their dreams of participatiing in the world's most televised -- and most heavily endorsed -- sporing event."
Look, if these athletes were up-front and simply say, "I'm in it for the money and glory", I wouldn't be so caustic about this whole issue. The entire pretense of noble grandure associated with these athletes just kills me!
When you grow up, you may learn that all this commerce is what makes civilization possible.
Yeah, and if you belive the commercials, commerce fights terrorism, too. Be patriotic and buy a Ford Explorer! :)
Gotta vent somewhere, eh?
While I can't possibly identify with the obsessive-compulsive desire to devote one's entire life to compete in a sport (WTF is it with this whole "sponsorship" thing, anyway?), I can respect such a person's talent and decision.
However, when these people bow to the forces that be and (for example) don't publish their own diaries on their own competitions, I lose respect for them. They should, in front of the cameras -- the world -- cast off the leash. But none do. Why? It's for the fame. They could go elsewhere to compete, but they simply don't.
So, you see, it's not that the IOC and Nike and Ford are the only evil Olympic forces. The athletes themselves knowingly sell their own souls.
For that reason, the Olymics do indeed suck.
I would love to see them -- sincerely.
I live in Salt Lake. As a citizen, I don't mind the world "shitting in my backyard" -- I'm no xenophobe and I welcome diversity. However, as a taxpayer, I've been quite outraged by most of the crap that's gone on these past few of years.
There's too much to bitch about, but my personal favorite was the $450,000 spent to give every bloody city employee an official 2002 Winter Games jacket.
Then there's all the cloak-and-dagger security bullshit going on around here. I work at the Univerity of Utah, and I'm working from home for most of February because it's too damned tough to get to campus! There's 3 black military choppers constantly flying overhead. A guy I work with was accosted by the Secret Service. He's foreign -- looks and sounds foreign -- and made the mistake of biking up to the hill overlooking the stadium to take a few digital snapshots. He was questioned, his pictures were deleted, and he was released.
Meanwhile, all of the on/off ramps into the city are totally un-guarded. Mostly industrial areas, the lots underneath these bridges are perfect places to park large trucks (which is normal anyway) full of explosives. I guess nobody cares about the mere visitors to Salt Lake -- only the corporate sponsors at the venues.
And what's it all for? So Budwiser and Nike can pimp their wares without any trouble. You really think that if this many people gathered for a non-commercial event (a protest perhaps), that they'd enforce a 45-mile radius no-fly zone around the event? No fucking way. This is all about selling stuff, people. I just feel bad for the businesses downtown that are effectly shut down due to the strict security perimeter.
If you want to read some independent local SLC journalism, I encourage you to read the City Weekly: http://www.avenews.com/index.html
Yeah -- I'm bitter. The TV in my house will be off for the month of February. The networks won't be getting my eyeballs (they lost them at Sydney).
Rubbish! Following the herd mentality of corporate america may be smart in the political aspects of business (so is knowing how to golf, but that's just as lame...), but not necessarily in the technical aspects.
Yes, you get what you pay for -- an unreasonable EULA and company that tells you "you're s.o.l." if anything should go wrong enough to cause your business damage, all for the yearly support cost of what could likely pay for a competent admin to deal with the software in-house. At least with GPL'd software, there's no pretense of accountability.
As for the techical comparison to PGP, I don't have the ability to evaluate code myself, so I must rely on those who care about security and have the ability to digest source code. To this end, if GPG support is good enough for users of Mixmaster anonymous remailers (these are some truly smart and paranoid folk) and for the OpenBSD maintaners, I'd have to say its okay for my needs.
And I'm pretty certain that GPG supports more algorithms than PGP, and you can be 100% certain that the out-of-the-box algorithms in GPG are not hindered by patents or license restrictions.
Just read this for how much responsibility software companies have to their paying customers.
Can you still do conceal carry without any sort of registration? Now that is something to be proud of!
What did I miss back in the mid-90's? I always thought Wired was more like Vogue for the technology set -- candy-coated fluff without much substance.
Anyone have an issue of the magazine this guy's talking about? :)
If I weren't moving soo, I'd switch *back* to Qwest (ugh!) and get slower DSL so I could get *faster* upstream.
Right now I get 1.5mbps down and 128kbps up. If I had the option of paying the same rate, but getting, say 512k/512k, I'd do it in a heartbeat. You how shitty the latency is on a SSH session when it's sharing a 128k upstream pipe with a data upload? It's close to unusable!
I know that switches and routers *can* custom-fit each connection, so if I want 512/512 and Foo wants 128/3.0mb, it can happen. The problem is that they don't offer it and thereby cripple us otherwise non abusive subscribers.
I stand by my protest.
I'm one of those users. I'm sick of AT&T limiting my upstream to 128kbs, upping my rates by $5 every 6 months, and cutting my d/l speed in half when @Home went under.
So, to "protest" I'm gonna take all the pipe I can get. I have a "wget -m local-kernel-mirror" going in the background at all times.
Yeah, I might be seen as a prick, but AT&T has the cash to not be such assholes when it comes to their rates and bandwidth policies. Screw-em.
Thanks for the link. I've never seen the NG CD series in person, just pondered whether to invest in them. Good to see something like this available.
I used to work for a small point-of-sale company. We had one programmer who's entire purpose in life was to do data conversions. If the competing company wouldn't open up their file format, he'd tear it apart in order to import our customer's existing data into our own system.
Sometimes it was even simpler: tell the old software to dump a full report to text file, massage with your own tools, then re-import into the new app. :)
I never heard of any legal scuffles as a result. And we'd often release (to customers) small utilities that would do the conversions.
I mean, there's an entire class of software devoted to pulling data from various closed formats. Given the extensive lists of some (I can't recall any names right now), I find it hard to believe they "licensed" the right to read those file formats from every single company.
On a related note, there are 2 apps that I'd love to see on Linux, but only have Windows versions. The first is the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Edition on CD-ROM, and the other is that huge CD-ROM collection from National Geographic that spans from 1888-2000 (or there abouts). Quite a project, to be sure, and I've always wondered myself if I'd catch hell if I ever figured out the DB structures and released the code to the OSS community.
Wrong -- there are tons out there.
My prior job was working for a small point-of-sale software company which catered to the lumber and building materials industry. You think these shops want to place a $1000 PC out on the warehouse floor? Nope, they use $300 dumb terminals. Much more durable and less to configure. RS-232 is still very much alive today, and I can't really forsee its demise in my lifetime. I'm sure there are many similar vertical markets with the same requirements.
Initially, the software was really propriety: written in Business BASIC running on something called SuperDOS. From the point of view of a Unix/NT admin, this was the most disgusting environment I'd ever encountered. :) But then they went to another BASIC environment which ran on SCO (yuck!) and AIX (not too bad). I now hear that linux is making inroads, displacing SCO, NT, and AIX.
Not that this has anything to do with the desktop environment, though. I simply had to refute the claim that dumb terminals are on their way out.
There used to be a cartoon at geekswithguns.org that portrayed 3 or 4 terrorists on an airplane, apologetically making excuses for their possesion of box cutters to a mob of angry and armed passengers. The caption read something like, "What may have happened on Sep. 11 if this were truly the land of the free." I agree with that cartoon 100%.
However... the no-guns-and-pricey-broadband thing really is tasteless, guys.
To imply that people should take up arms for something as silly as broadbad just trivializes the concept of an armed citizenry. And, frankly, I'm ashamed of my fellow Americans here at /. who would so quickly (even in jest) make this comment.
If more of our fellow countrymen were more self-sustaining, I truly believe this world would be a far better place.
Our current culture breeds indifference to our fellow man and dependence on multi-billion dollar multinational corps.
I've seen too many documentaries where "civilization" encroaching on some simpler peoples draws away the youth, until the culture all but dissapears. Is this progress?
Do you really think the US would be a bad place to live is the majority lived like modern-day Amish?
Our income will be very little, by design. I do plan on a symbolic year of absolutely no income, so the Man will end up writing me a check come tax return time. (Earned income credit is a wonderful thing!) We'll sell surplus offspring (angora goats go for a pretty penny, as do miniature cows), barter with eggs and cheese, and other excess we have (but not relying on it). I'll do freelance work as a consultant, if the desire or need arises. Of course, we'll be going into this will a little savings for rainy day.
Check out Lehman's for all sorts of non-electric stuff.
We're no Luddites, but we realize our lives can be so much more with so much less than we have now.
As someone who has purchased 20 acres out in the sticks, and plans on being damned near self-sufficient in the near future, I always wonder why our society is so screwed up in this respect. The only people who seem to benefit in our current system is (you guessed it) big business and the wealthy. The rest will be purpetual wage slaves
I plan to give up a confortable middle-class income for the peace of mind that comes from providing for one's self, far before retirement age. I will work when I feel like it -- I don't think I'll ever want to totally leave the computer field -- and I'll barter as much as I can.
I will not be a wage slave until I'm 65!
There is the option, however, to cancel a download mid stream without depleting your download count.
Wasn't there something called "leech zmodem" back in the BBS days? This version of zmodem would abort the download at the very last byte, so as to fool the BBS's upload/download ratio tracking.
I bet something like this will make the rounds when Pay Napster comes online.
So who pissed in your cornflakes this morning, eh?
Niche market, my friend. If you build it, they will come.
(sound of crickets)
Thank you.
The fact is, even with huge players in market (or a monopoloy), smaller niche competitors can thrive. It's ok to tout your coolness factor. Who cares if stuffy business suits don't trust your coolness! To hell with 'em, I say.
Granted, Jobs may in fact be the anti-christ everyone says he is, but he's doing quite fine for himself, don't you think?
And one thing Katz forgets: those conservative baby boomers have... kids who want "cool" technology. This is not a market to brush off so easily!
We also got to buy some sort of really good licensing deal. For like $1000, we got 10 copies of damned near everything: WinNT, Office, SQL, Exchange, etc. I guess the idea was to let us play with the software, so we could peddle it more effectively.
Well, we eventually merged with another company. They were truly anal about software licensing, so we tried to do the proper self-audit.
We couldn't sort out the exact meaning of the 10-pack deal I mentioned earlier, so we called the local Microsoft branch and asked if the license we had purchased accounted for X many copies we were using.
Nobody at M$ could give us a straight answer about the licensing. We finally gave up after a few weeks of emails and calls. We figured that if were really were auditted, we'd throw the paper trail of attempted compliance back at them.
As a fellow MCSE (NT 4.0 + Internet), I can't see how linux is a "massive" configuration any more than NT is. Most distros give you a nice GUI interface for configuration -- if you want it.
Personally, I've never understood the need to drive a VGA monitor for a server OS. All I need is terminal access and vi.
Seriously, though, there quite a few floppy-based specailized linux distros (router, firewall, etc.). I haven't come across much more.
Man, I'm feeling old.
I still prefer pine for email, trn for usenet, gnut for gnutella, and ncftp for ftp. I get annoyed when people email me attachements -- I'd prefer a URL.
The thought of everyone and their dog wisking voice and video at me kinda bugs me. Whatever happened to the "talk" command?
I'm only 29 and I'm starting to feel like that "condescending unix computer user" in Dilbert. :)