My own take on this oscillates: sometimes I think that it is still possible for a garage start-up to make it, sometimes I don't. I do believe that it is possible for one or more smart people to create a killer product on their own but recent history shows that a great product isn't enough. It has to be effectively marketed, something a lot of Smart People don't do well, and even then (in our current litigacous US society) you still have to have money to fend off the lawsuits competitors will throw at you if for no other reason than to run you out of cash and out of business. Sometimes the best I think can happen is that you get bought out and watch someone with deeper pockets get rich. Maybe you'll get enough to pay off your student loans, maybe not. Rich people don't like to see the peasants making it good, you know. What good is an exclusive club if anyone can join?
Perhaps the difficulty is that there's little need for more software vendors producing "me too" products. Is there really a profitable niche for selling a new spreadsheet, database, or word processor? E-mail or chat client? I doubt it. The challenge -- and the reward -- comes from inventing new products that don't exist yet, or which do exist but don't work very well. Remember too that the real money often doesn't come to the first group introducing something new and radical but rather to the more highly polished second and third. 'Course, that was before software patents...
Fishing, yes, but not for the license. They sent the letter to license holders. No, what they're fishing for is who is contributing to Linux (any contributions, from any source.) It's a poison pen: admit that you've contributed to Linux (whether from SCO or not) and you can expect at least a discovery lawsuit, if not a full-bore infringement action from SCO. Not terribly clever of them but I think they're running out of alleged infringement examples. They've been reduced to mining their hapless customer base for both more examples as well as more defendents. Things aren't going well in SCO-land, I think.
We're both looking foreward to watching it. One copy will be sufficient (for now.) English major = still at home.:) (Of course these days, there are no guarantees of a job regardless of the major. Still, I have to believe that if she'd majored in mathematics like her mom and I thought she should have, she wouldn't have this problem.)
Nah, not her. English major. Daughter #2 might (web designer) but she doesn't know what I'd post under. I don't think she does, anyway.
Years ago when she and son #1 were in high school there was something of a competition to break into my desktop PC through the house network. Kept me on my toes for quite a while! Eventually I turned to encryption to make sure that if they did break in they wouldn't get anything interesting, like account IDs and passwords. They've outgrown breaking my network but I still keep most stuff encrypted, just out of habit.
Are you one of those guys who buys their mom a basketball?:-)
Nope. Neither of us care to watch sports. Mom's more into fishing (nope, not me: boring...) Tryig to figure out what to get her for Christmas is something of a problem, though. Still working on it. She's retired, pretty much has what she wants or needs.
There's something to be said for this approach (depending on what you want to get out of photography.) IF you can find batteries for the old cameras.:)
The camera, I mean. Anything in the $200 range is going to be pretty much the same, feature-wise. Some will have this feature and some will have that but nothing will have everything.
The real question is, what do you want to photograph? 35mm is very versatile but for extra features you have to pay more. There are many used cameras in your price range and a few new (note that the K1000, while a fine camera, is no longer being made. You may be able to find new ones in stores, though.)
Personally, I don't think you need to worry about the brand. They're all pretty much the same, regardless of what their proponents and detractors have to say. The best idea for you is to go somewhere you can actually hold and dry-fire candidates before you have to buy them: it really helps having someone show you where all the buttons are and what they do and feel how it works in your hands.
Once you've narrowed the choices to three or fewer, research user comments on the web (and take everything you read, including this, with a grain of salt.) One note about used cameras: be sure that the batteries it needs are still being made! The old Minolta SRT series cameras were some of the best inexpensive all metall all manual 35mm SLRs ever made by anyone, but they were designed to use mercury cells which are now illegal. They can use Wein air cell batteries, or be converted to use currently available alkalines, but Wein cells will cost a bit more and the conversion to use alkalines will cost, too. Other older cameras have the same problems and for some of them, the End is Nigh. I have a couple of ancient Yashica Electro 35s (old rangefinders) which live underneath my car seat (good beater camera.) There are no currently available batteries for this camera: the last supplier of near-equivalents stopped making the odd size a couple of years ago. (If anyone knows where I can get a few, let me know!) Good luck!
The writer and Forbes had the opportunity to provide a potentially interesting story on enforcement of rather unusual contract terms; they chose instead to provide useless fluff, opinon masquarading as news reporting. Thanks for wasting my time and money.
The conflict the reporter pretended to report on has real repercussions in the real world: he chose instead to make fun of open source advocates. Instead of the real business matter, how an unusual software license is enforced by an industry body rather than by an individual corporate entity, he chose to depict it as some spurious conflict between capitalists and communists.
Frankly, if I were a principle of Microsoft or some other owner of significant body of intellectual property enforced by licenses, I'd consider litigation. Your writer chose to make light of a subject in a way which appears to encourage the casual violation of software license terms. The GPL is no different from a legal point of view than the shrinkwrap licenses common to every day business software: by making fun of efforts to enforce its terms, Forbes has placed itself curiously on the side of software pirates and warez crackers. What are you guys, communists of something?:)
This isn't even speculation. This summer I was chatting with our phone company's former senior digital technician (Verizon has been aggressive about getting rid of senior people in the past few years: new college grads are *so* much cheaper.) He said that when the law forced Verizon to resell its DSL infrastructure to competitors they stopped installing it. Once the law changed so they didn't have to share their infrastructure with competitors they started expanding it again.
That's the problem with a monopoly: they think they own you. Wait -- they do own you! We don't have a choice about LECs here, either. We can have Verizon or we can have a cell phone (sans all the nifty new digital features, of course!) The state legislature tries to help, but every time they make noises about competition it's like Verizon gets petulant: service goes all to hell and Verizon moans loudly about not having enough money to maintain their system. Once the legislature gets scared off, things go back to normal (i.e., crappy service, random disconnects, and a strange inability to resolve problems.) In all honesty, if Al Queda decided to bomb Verizon corporate headquarters I don't think many folks around here would be too upset.
Crikey, are you sure? Have you checked again recently?
Yep. That's probably why DSL is rolling out so slowly -- they don't really want to replace $200 per month ISDN accounts with $30-$40 per month DSL accounts, even though they'd get a lot more of them. That $200 per month is almost pure profit; the capital outlay for the ISDN stuff was long ago recovered while installing DSL would cost money they probably wouldn't recoup for a couple of years at least.
If I were a betting man I'd bet that Comcast will get their crap together first and we'll have cable access within a year or so, although at $70 per month it's on the expensive side. Verizon will probably provide DSL soon after, at about half the price.
One interesting point: neither Comcast nor Verizon will quote a connection speed. Two years ago, one year ago, they did and Verizon even tiered their service price based on speed but now they won't mention speed at all. Just "high speed internet access". My guess is that they're throttling it 'way down, into the 128k-256k range, but until they make it available I won't know for sure. Why is it I feel that they're trying to sell me a boat with holes in the bottom?:)
Oh come on now, that's not even funny. Of course you're rural.
Really? Maybe I ought to consider voting more conservative. I think there's a Liberatarian party around here, somewhere.:)
There's a city of 100,000+ 13 miles to the west: they're in Ameritech land and are sort of wired. There's an even smaller town to the northwest which is more or less a bedroom community to both cities; they've had broadband for a couple of years via Comcast. Our network admin lives on the road which forms the county line and for odd geographical reasons Comcast has a cable running past her house and wired her up this past spring. She's less than two miles from my house and she has 10mb/s (darn near vacant segment,) while I have a modem... *grumble*.
The sad thing is, we have 12 computers on the house network and could *really* use faster network access. Did you ever try to split a 56k modem five ways? I never did get channel-bonding working properly, either: it either works for the Windows PCs or for the Linux PCs, but not both simultaneously. Daughter #1 is a writer, #2 is a web designer, and son #1 is a musician/composer and student. Wife spends an inordinate time researching one thing or another, and I'm a programmer and student also. It is obvious that 56k isn't adequate, but there just aren't any affordable alternatives right now.
Nope: Sprint's digital PCS stuff mostly drops dead about five miles west of where I live. It covers the larger (100K+) city just to the west and within a couple of miles of a major east-west highway north of me, but digital services aren't sold in my county and mostly don't work here.
I could have "broadband", if I were interested in satellite. Or ISDN. That's it, those are my options. Heck, I can't even get digital cable...
The telecom industry's claim that broadband is available to 80% of the US population is only true if you count satellite and ISDN, neither of which I count as really being "broadband". The owner of our company has ISDN at home and I approve the bills: 128K ISDN here costs $200 per month. Satellite pushes $100 per month. Quasi-broadband isn't worth that much to me.
Am I rural? I never thought so, but then again I could be wrong. I live in the suburbs of a small city of about 45,000, less than 200 meters from the closest phone company remote switch (which is optical fiber. Had a lovely conversation with the installer there last summer.) A couple of years ago the local phone co. (Verizon) announced with much fanfare that this town was to be a showcase of broadband in our state, one of the first three communities to be pervasively wired. Never happened and every time I ask they say, maybe in six months.
Comcast came by this summer and ran new backbone cable through everyone's back yards, but never came back to run the lines to the houses (a subdivision of about 100 homes.) Two months ago they sent people around with literature, trying to get people to sign up for digital cable and broadband. They swore up and down it was available that day. Just try to actually sign up, though: not available, maybe will be by the end of the year. Or maybe not.
Call me cranky but I'm not willing to move to a large city for the convenience of broadband internet connections. At this point I'm so disgusted over casually broken promises that I don't care if they ever wire the place. Screw 'em.
Otherwise video stores would have tried it years ago.
And so they did. Perhaps you are young but 20-odd years ago, before every grocery store had video rentals and before Blockbuster and it's ilk drove the corner mom & pop video rental places out of business, almost all of the places I rented videos from did exactly the same thing. You paid a membership fee which allowed you to check out n videos at a time. You kept them as long as you liked and, once you had n videos out, couldn't get more until you brought some back. Of course, they also rented them by the day, etc. for walk-ins who didn't want to pony up for a "membership" fee.
Even earlier, when video stores first began to dot the landscape, you had to pay a "membership" fee just to rent videos. That only lasted a couple of years: too many places figured out that they could rent more videos (and collect more late fees than memberships brought in,) by not forcing people to pay a bogus fee before they could rent. Lots of schemes were tried to keep the membership fee (discount rentals, keep them an extra day, etc.) but the fees disappeared fairly quickly all the same.
I have no idea how Netflix managed to patent an idea Ma and Pa Kettle were using (and trying variations on) more than two decades ago, but then that's what I'm beginning to expect out of big government: big incompetance. Apparently they don't let patent examiners get out much: do they just pack them in big white boxes at quitting time, or are they now using shiny aluminum tubes?
Apparently this is what you get for letting a bunch of drooling, senile old farts run things. What's the going price for a SCOTUS decision these days, a case of Depends? Heck -- still cheaper than a Congressman...
I guess that helps to explain what happened to Drexel-Burnham-Lambert. Be seen as making a wrong decision and you're out the door. I'll bet they still can't comprehend the death of company loyalty, or why eventually the sleeze oozed to the top of their organization.
It would be a lot funnier if this attitude didn't represent the viewpoint of so many incompetant managers out there. 'Next contestant' my ass: have you ever wondered why the competant people went to work for someone else, dipshit? ('Dipshit' is Mr. O'Neil, not the/. poster.)
IANAL but I don't see this thing ever getting to trial. Whether SCO has a basis or not, between SCO's agreements with IBM and Novell, IBM's license agreements with their AIX customers, SCO's agreements with Microsoft, and BSD's agreements with whomever, SCO doesn't have the money to even participate in the discovery phase of a trial (where logically all these agreements would be sorted out, along with where each alleged incident of copying came from and who "owns" them.) It will take years, involve dozens to hundreds of expert witnesses and lawyers, and cost millions. SCO doesn't have that kind of money, particularly to throw away on something so speculative as a court fight against IBM. Therefore, they don't intend to.
The question is then, why start a legal challenge you don't intend on following through with? What does SCO stand to gain by initiating a court suit they don't intend to try?
SCO is making a lot of noise. Maybe they want to be bought out and this was all they could think of to get themeselves noticed. If so it was stupid: nobody buys toxic waste.
Maybe they're being paid to cause a short storm. Heh. Conspiracy theorists can line up to the left...
Maybe they're bored. Heck, it isn't like they have a business plan otherwise.
Maybe they're on drugs. *Shrug* From where I'm sitting it's as good a theory as any...:)
Most communities around here don't care what you do at your home, so long as it is unnoticable. The line is drawn at signs, trucks, and traffic: they don't like those. I asked at the local code compliance office when I started my consulting business 10 years ago; they told me that so long as I didn't put up a sign, didn't run truck traffic through residential areas, and didn't have mobs of customers trying to park on residential streets, they didn't care. And so it proved.
Of course, this is semi-rural Indiana, which takes "laid back" to a whole new level of meaning. Your mileage may vary, especially if you choose to live in an overpopulated center of pollution otherwise known as a city.:)
I started gaming over 30 years ago. Avalon Hill board games were the big thing then and Strategy & Tactics magazine (with a board game in every issue.) D&D in high school (the original three booklets: #4 when released was a BIG event, the first addition to the rules in a long time.) I spent most of my time with minatures and I played just about everything and anything: Napoleonic era, American Civil War, English Civil War, ancient, medieval, WWI, WWII and modern armor, naval minatures (had the darndest WWI Austro-Hungarian fleet you ever saw -- a Tatra class DD squadron was enormous fun! Trouble was, you only had the one squadron: that's all they built...)
Anyway, I spent most of my post-pubescent years up through the first few years of my marriage with this stuff. A number of years ago my son got interested in one of the fantasy games (I forget which one.) After some research I advised him to not get too heavily into it. There were two reasons: cost, and the heavily commercialization surrounding it. He ended up buying a starter set of minatures, building them and painting them, then didn't play much. He noticed one of the killer errors of previous generations of poorly designed games: they take too long to play and too much of that time is spent nosing through the rules.
Tractics was the original "encyclopedic" game I recall playing. I call it encyclopedic because you couldn't play the thing without continuous reference to a thick book of complex rules. Tractics (rules for modern armor -- read that as tanks and infantry -- minatures) games could go on for eight hours and you'd discovered that you'd only played six turns, with no outcome in sight. Deeply frustrating.
One of my buddies, a very bright guy, condensed and abstracted Tractics into a playable set of rules that yielded 95%+ identical results in about six pages of rules, most of which were easily memorized tables. Basically, he refactored Tractics into something playable (and much more enjoyable) that you could get a full game, 20+ turns out of, in six to eight hours. A group of about 20 or so of us played these rules for about 10 years, (and for all I know are still playing them: I dropped out about the time my first kid was born.)
The point? Gaming goes through cycles, just like everything else. The first D&D was very playable but it got popular, more rules were written (mostly to have something to sell,) and it stopped being fun. The days when you could spend an enjoyable afternoon running through a dungeon as a somewhat unstable Orc with a spear are long gone. Lots of companies were formed, sold a bunch of stuff and disappeared. Other companies looked at the field, saw the litter of commercial corpses, and decided to make other games instead. This left things open for gamers to sell the stuff they loved and games got good again. Once someone started to make money again the commercialization process started all over, which is where things are today.
Personally I've moved on to computer games. Talonsoft has (or had, I dunno,) a great line of PC games for old minatures freaks, and there are a lot of choices. It isn't the same as moving a squadron of Hussars across a tabletop river, or trying to figure out where your opponent has hidden his weapons platoon with those damned mortars, but it's a lot easier than finding another minatures player who actually knows some history to game with. So this company has done something stupid and will, in all probability, flame out. So what: that's part of the life cycle. Gaming won't lose much, from what I've seen of their products.
Is because their retail dealers are screaming about internet (and before the net, mail order dealers,) undercutting them on price. That's the only reason for a manufacturer to take this kind of action, every other excuse is smoke and fluff.
If they survive the drastic drop in sales (which always happens when companies do this,) they'll be back on the net shortly. How quickly it happens depends on how much of their sales came from Internet sources. If internet sales accounted for much of their revenue they'll be back quickly; if not, they may just fade away. They don't have enough retail exposure (enough retailers carrying their stuff) to pretend the play the mass market game.
Slashdot Mirror
And good lawyers are expensive.
My own take on this oscillates: sometimes I think that it is still possible for a garage start-up to make it, sometimes I don't. I do believe that it is possible for one or more smart people to create a killer product on their own but recent history shows that a great product isn't enough. It has to be effectively marketed, something a lot of Smart People don't do well, and even then (in our current litigacous US society) you still have to have money to fend off the lawsuits competitors will throw at you if for no other reason than to run you out of cash and out of business. Sometimes the best I think can happen is that you get bought out and watch someone with deeper pockets get rich. Maybe you'll get enough to pay off your student loans, maybe not. Rich people don't like to see the peasants making it good, you know. What good is an exclusive club if anyone can join?
Perhaps the difficulty is that there's little need for more software vendors producing "me too" products. Is there really a profitable niche for selling a new spreadsheet, database, or word processor? E-mail or chat client? I doubt it. The challenge -- and the reward -- comes from inventing new products that don't exist yet, or which do exist but don't work very well. Remember too that the real money often doesn't come to the first group introducing something new and radical but rather to the more highly polished second and third. 'Course, that was before software patents...
Fishing, yes, but not for the license. They sent the letter to license holders. No, what they're fishing for is who is contributing to Linux (any contributions, from any source.) It's a poison pen: admit that you've contributed to Linux (whether from SCO or not) and you can expect at least a discovery lawsuit, if not a full-bore infringement action from SCO. Not terribly clever of them but I think they're running out of alleged infringement examples. They've been reduced to mining their hapless customer base for both more examples as well as more defendents. Things aren't going well in SCO-land, I think.
RB
We're both looking foreward to watching it. One copy will be sufficient (for now.) English major = still at home. :) (Of course these days, there are no guarantees of a job regardless of the major. Still, I have to believe that if she'd majored in mathematics like her mom and I thought she should have, she wouldn't have this problem.)
Rb
Nah, not her. English major. Daughter #2 might (web designer) but she doesn't know what I'd post under. I don't think she does, anyway.
Years ago when she and son #1 were in high school there was something of a competition to break into my desktop PC through the house network. Kept me on my toes for quite a while! Eventually I turned to encryption to make sure that if they did break in they wouldn't get anything interesting, like account IDs and passwords. They've outgrown breaking my network but I still keep most stuff encrypted, just out of habit.
Rb
Nope. Neither of us care to watch sports. Mom's more into fishing (nope, not me: boring...) Tryig to figure out what to get her for Christmas is something of a problem, though. Still working on it. She's retired, pretty much has what she wants or needs.
RB
Bought it for my daughter for Christmas a week ago. Looking foreward to seeing the three un-aired episodes.
And to think they took this off and left "Everyone Loves Raymond" on. Now they're wondering why we don't watch TV...
RB
Rb
The real question is, what do you want to photograph? 35mm is very versatile but for extra features you have to pay more. There are many used cameras in your price range and a few new (note that the K1000, while a fine camera, is no longer being made. You may be able to find new ones in stores, though.)
Personally, I don't think you need to worry about the brand. They're all pretty much the same, regardless of what their proponents and detractors have to say. The best idea for you is to go somewhere you can actually hold and dry-fire candidates before you have to buy them: it really helps having someone show you where all the buttons are and what they do and feel how it works in your hands.
Once you've narrowed the choices to three or fewer, research user comments on the web (and take everything you read, including this, with a grain of salt.) One note about used cameras: be sure that the batteries it needs are still being made! The old Minolta SRT series cameras were some of the best inexpensive all metall all manual 35mm SLRs ever made by anyone, but they were designed to use mercury cells which are now illegal. They can use Wein air cell batteries, or be converted to use currently available alkalines, but Wein cells will cost a bit more and the conversion to use alkalines will cost, too. Other older cameras have the same problems and for some of them, the End is Nigh. I have a couple of ancient Yashica Electro 35s (old rangefinders) which live underneath my car seat (good beater camera.) There are no currently available batteries for this camera: the last supplier of near-equivalents stopped making the odd size a couple of years ago. (If anyone knows where I can get a few, let me know!)
Good luck!
Rb
COBOL, Fortran, mainframes, tech jobs, on-shore IT managers...
:)
The list is long, the night is short. Run, lemmings, run!
Rb
The writer and Forbes had the opportunity to provide a potentially interesting story on enforcement of rather unusual contract terms; they chose instead to provide useless fluff, opinon masquarading as news reporting. Thanks for wasting my time and money.
:)
The conflict the reporter pretended to report on has real repercussions in the real world: he chose instead to make fun of open source advocates. Instead of the real business matter, how an unusual software license is enforced by an industry body rather than by an individual corporate entity, he chose to depict it as some spurious conflict between capitalists and communists.
Frankly, if I were a principle of Microsoft or some other owner of significant body of intellectual property enforced by licenses, I'd consider litigation. Your writer chose to make light of a subject in a way which appears to encourage the casual violation of software license terms. The GPL is no different from a legal point of view than the shrinkwrap licenses common to every day business software: by making fun of efforts to enforce its terms, Forbes has placed itself curiously on the side of software pirates and warez crackers. What are you guys, communists of something?
Cripes, folks: we're even slashdotting secondary links now. How long before /. is reclassified as a DOS attack? :)
That's the problem with a monopoly: they think they own you. Wait -- they do own you! We don't have a choice about LECs here, either. We can have Verizon or we can have a cell phone (sans all the nifty new digital features, of course!) The state legislature tries to help, but every time they make noises about competition it's like Verizon gets petulant: service goes all to hell and Verizon moans loudly about not having enough money to maintain their system. Once the legislature gets scared off, things go back to normal (i.e., crappy service, random disconnects, and a strange inability to resolve problems.) In all honesty, if Al Queda decided to bomb Verizon corporate headquarters I don't think many folks around here would be too upset.
Rocketboy
Yep. That's probably why DSL is rolling out so slowly -- they don't really want to replace $200 per month ISDN accounts with $30-$40 per month DSL accounts, even though they'd get a lot more of them. That $200 per month is almost pure profit; the capital outlay for the ISDN stuff was long ago recovered while installing DSL would cost money they probably wouldn't recoup for a couple of years at least.
If I were a betting man I'd bet that Comcast will get their crap together first and we'll have cable access within a year or so, although at $70 per month it's on the expensive side. Verizon will probably provide DSL soon after, at about half the price.
One interesting point: neither Comcast nor Verizon will quote a connection speed. Two years ago, one year ago, they did and Verizon even tiered their service price based on speed but now they won't mention speed at all. Just "high speed internet access". My guess is that they're throttling it 'way down, into the 128k-256k range, but until they make it available I won't know for sure. Why is it I feel that they're trying to sell me a boat with holes in the bottom? :)
Rocketboy
Really? Maybe I ought to consider voting more conservative. I think there's a Liberatarian party around here, somewhere. :)
There's a city of 100,000+ 13 miles to the west: they're in Ameritech land and are sort of wired. There's an even smaller town to the northwest which is more or less a bedroom community to both cities; they've had broadband for a couple of years via Comcast. Our network admin lives on the road which forms the county line and for odd geographical reasons Comcast has a cable running past her house and wired her up this past spring. She's less than two miles from my house and she has 10mb/s (darn near vacant segment,) while I have a modem... *grumble*.
The sad thing is, we have 12 computers on the house network and could *really* use faster network access. Did you ever try to split a 56k modem five ways? I never did get channel-bonding working properly, either: it either works for the Windows PCs or for the Linux PCs, but not both simultaneously. Daughter #1 is a writer, #2 is a web designer, and son #1 is a musician/composer and student. Wife spends an inordinate time researching one thing or another, and I'm a programmer and student also. It is obvious that 56k isn't adequate, but there just aren't any affordable alternatives right now.
Nope: Sprint's digital PCS stuff mostly drops dead about five miles west of where I live. It covers the larger (100K+) city just to the west and within a couple of miles of a major east-west highway north of me, but digital services aren't sold in my county and mostly don't work here.
I could have "broadband", if I were interested in satellite. Or ISDN. That's it, those are my options. Heck, I can't even get digital cable...
The telecom industry's claim that broadband is available to 80% of the US population is only true if you count satellite and ISDN, neither of which I count as really being "broadband". The owner of our company has ISDN at home and I approve the bills: 128K ISDN here costs $200 per month. Satellite pushes $100 per month. Quasi-broadband isn't worth that much to me.
Am I rural? I never thought so, but then again I could be wrong. I live in the suburbs of a small city of about 45,000, less than 200 meters from the closest phone company remote switch (which is optical fiber. Had a lovely conversation with the installer there last summer.) A couple of years ago the local phone co. (Verizon) announced with much fanfare that this town was to be a showcase of broadband in our state, one of the first three communities to be pervasively wired. Never happened and every time I ask they say, maybe in six months.
Comcast came by this summer and ran new backbone cable through everyone's back yards, but never came back to run the lines to the houses (a subdivision of about 100 homes.) Two months ago they sent people around with literature, trying to get people to sign up for digital cable and broadband. They swore up and down it was available that day. Just try to actually sign up, though: not available, maybe will be by the end of the year. Or maybe not.
Call me cranky but I'm not willing to move to a large city for the convenience of broadband internet connections. At this point I'm so disgusted over casually broken promises that I don't care if they ever wire the place. Screw 'em.
Rocketboy
And so they did. Perhaps you are young but 20-odd years ago, before every grocery store had video rentals and before Blockbuster and it's ilk drove the corner mom & pop video rental places out of business, almost all of the places I rented videos from did exactly the same thing. You paid a membership fee which allowed you to check out n videos at a time. You kept them as long as you liked and, once you had n videos out, couldn't get more until you brought some back. Of course, they also rented them by the day, etc. for walk-ins who didn't want to pony up for a "membership" fee.
Even earlier, when video stores first began to dot the landscape, you had to pay a "membership" fee just to rent videos. That only lasted a couple of years: too many places figured out that they could rent more videos (and collect more late fees than memberships brought in,) by not forcing people to pay a bogus fee before they could rent. Lots of schemes were tried to keep the membership fee (discount rentals, keep them an extra day, etc.) but the fees disappeared fairly quickly all the same.
I have no idea how Netflix managed to patent an idea Ma and Pa Kettle were using (and trying variations on) more than two decades ago, but then that's what I'm beginning to expect out of big government: big incompetance. Apparently they don't let patent examiners get out much: do they just pack them in big white boxes at quitting time, or are they now using shiny aluminum tubes?
Rb
Is it just me or does anyone else see the irony of posters favoring censorship and opposing privacy posting as AC?
Apparently this is what you get for letting a bunch of drooling, senile old farts run things. What's the going price for a SCOTUS decision these days, a case of Depends? Heck -- still cheaper than a Congressman...
I guess that helps to explain what happened to Drexel-Burnham-Lambert. Be seen as making a wrong decision and you're out the door. I'll bet they still can't comprehend the death of company loyalty, or why eventually the sleeze oozed to the top of their organization.
/. poster.)
It would be a lot funnier if this attitude didn't represent the viewpoint of so many incompetant managers out there. 'Next contestant' my ass: have you ever wondered why the competant people went to work for someone else, dipshit? ('Dipshit' is Mr. O'Neil, not the
IANAL but I don't see this thing ever getting to trial. Whether SCO has a basis or not, between SCO's agreements with IBM and Novell, IBM's license agreements with their AIX customers, SCO's agreements with Microsoft, and BSD's agreements with whomever, SCO doesn't have the money to even participate in the discovery phase of a trial (where logically all these agreements would be sorted out, along with where each alleged incident of copying came from and who "owns" them.) It will take years, involve dozens to hundreds of expert witnesses and lawyers, and cost millions. SCO doesn't have that kind of money, particularly to throw away on something so speculative as a court fight against IBM. Therefore, they don't intend to.
:)
The question is then, why start a legal challenge you don't intend on following through with? What does SCO stand to gain by initiating a court suit they don't intend to try?
SCO is making a lot of noise. Maybe they want to be bought out and this was all they could think of to get themeselves noticed. If so it was stupid: nobody buys toxic waste.
Maybe they're being paid to cause a short storm. Heh. Conspiracy theorists can line up to the left...
Maybe they're bored. Heck, it isn't like they have a business plan otherwise.
Maybe they're on drugs. *Shrug* From where I'm sitting it's as good a theory as any...
Most communities around here don't care what you do at your home, so long as it is unnoticable. The line is drawn at signs, trucks, and traffic: they don't like those. I asked at the local code compliance office when I started my consulting business 10 years ago; they told me that so long as I didn't put up a sign, didn't run truck traffic through residential areas, and didn't have mobs of customers trying to park on residential streets, they didn't care. And so it proved.
:)
Of course, this is semi-rural Indiana, which takes "laid back" to a whole new level of meaning. Your mileage may vary, especially if you choose to live in an overpopulated center of pollution otherwise known as a city.
Rocketboy
I started gaming over 30 years ago. Avalon Hill board games were the big thing then and Strategy & Tactics magazine (with a board game in every issue.) D&D in high school (the original three booklets: #4 when released was a BIG event, the first addition to the rules in a long time.) I spent most of my time with minatures and I played just about everything and anything: Napoleonic era, American Civil War, English Civil War, ancient, medieval, WWI, WWII and modern armor, naval minatures (had the darndest WWI Austro-Hungarian fleet you ever saw -- a Tatra class DD squadron was enormous fun! Trouble was, you only had the one squadron: that's all they built...)
Anyway, I spent most of my post-pubescent years up through the first few years of my marriage with this stuff. A number of years ago my son got interested in one of the fantasy games (I forget which one.) After some research I advised him to not get too heavily into it. There were two reasons: cost, and the heavily commercialization surrounding it. He ended up buying a starter set of minatures, building them and painting them, then didn't play much. He noticed one of the killer errors of previous generations of poorly designed games: they take too long to play and too much of that time is spent nosing through the rules.
Tractics was the original "encyclopedic" game I recall playing. I call it encyclopedic because you couldn't play the thing without continuous reference to a thick book of complex rules. Tractics (rules for modern armor -- read that as tanks and infantry -- minatures) games could go on for eight hours and you'd discovered that you'd only played six turns, with no outcome in sight. Deeply frustrating.
One of my buddies, a very bright guy, condensed and abstracted Tractics into a playable set of rules that yielded 95%+ identical results in about six pages of rules, most of which were easily memorized tables. Basically, he refactored Tractics into something playable (and much more enjoyable) that you could get a full game, 20+ turns out of, in six to eight hours. A group of about 20 or so of us played these rules for about 10 years, (and for all I know are still playing them: I dropped out about the time my first kid was born.)
The point? Gaming goes through cycles, just like everything else. The first D&D was very playable but it got popular, more rules were written (mostly to have something to sell,) and it stopped being fun. The days when you could spend an enjoyable afternoon running through a dungeon as a somewhat unstable Orc with a spear are long gone. Lots of companies were formed, sold a bunch of stuff and disappeared. Other companies looked at the field, saw the litter of commercial corpses, and decided to make other games instead. This left things open for gamers to sell the stuff they loved and games got good again. Once someone started to make money again the commercialization process started all over, which is where things are today.
Personally I've moved on to computer games. Talonsoft has (or had, I dunno,) a great line of PC games for old minatures freaks, and there are a lot of choices. It isn't the same as moving a squadron of Hussars across a tabletop river, or trying to figure out where your opponent has hidden his weapons platoon with those damned mortars, but it's a lot easier than finding another minatures player who actually knows some history to game with. So this company has done something stupid and will, in all probability, flame out. So what: that's part of the life cycle. Gaming won't lose much, from what I've seen of their products.
Is because their retail dealers are screaming about internet (and before the net, mail order dealers,) undercutting them on price. That's the only reason for a manufacturer to take this kind of action, every other excuse is smoke and fluff.
If they survive the drastic drop in sales (which always happens when companies do this,) they'll be back on the net shortly. How quickly it happens depends on how much of their sales came from Internet sources. If internet sales accounted for much of their revenue they'll be back quickly; if not, they may just fade away. They don't have enough retail exposure (enough retailers carrying their stuff) to pretend the play the mass market game.