Who would trust something as important as their e-mail to a beta service that could disappear, go down, or start charging at any moment? Hotmail's been around for ten years and, despite all its criticisms here, it still works without a cover-your-ass BETA tag on it.
Conspiracy theory: Google's testing out a payment system of its own. Who's to say they won't pull an Apple iTools and start rolling out a paid set of features for power users?
Calling MTV "Music Television" is like calling AT&T "American Telephone and Telegraph." MTV long ago changed from just playing music videos to airing a lot of lifestyle programming. At some level, they identified NeoPets as something that they could use to continue going after their young demographic (note that MTV Networks also owns Nickelodeon). They don't even use the "Music Television" subtitle any more, having reverted to a KFC-like use of just their letters as a corporate name. When's the last time it was insightful to point out that MTV doesn't play videos any more?
That acronym has already been taken by Fans Against Gordon, for racing fans that dislike Jeff Gordon. They have no web site per se but a Google Images search turns up their signature design.
I bought my copy of Katamari Damacy at Best Buy. It's not like it's that hard to find. If you can't find it at your local category-killer store, you can buy it on-line.
Coming up on Slashdot: How on-line shopping will kill off Best Buy and EB Games!
Just because you have a cache of something doesn't give you the right to redistribute it for commercial gain. The initial author still retains ownership.
I'm not claiming that it is unethical to cache web pages, just that companies such as Google presume that they have the right to redistribute content to which they own no rights. The web is not like Usenet, where each server hosts others' posts; content is served by an author for as long as the author wants.
If you consider your HTML content to be unproductible copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell is it publically accessible on the Web in the first place?
If you consider your music to be copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell it's being played on the radio in the first place?
If you consider your book to be copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell it's being lent out in the library in the first place?
If you consider your movie to be copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell it's being broadcast on HBO in the first place?
Just because something is available for free doesn't mean that the producer has granted you a permanent license to distribute it for commercial gain, as Google does with its cache.
Yes, I did. I got two responses, neither of which answered my question.
1. FAIR USE! 2. Google is merely providing a service. If you don't like it you can opt out.
The Google Cache is not fair use, as it reproduces the entirety of a web page's text for none of the purposes for which Fair Use is defined. (Under Fair Use you are entitled to use a portion of a copyrighted work, not the whole thing.)
The second one just cracks me up. I thought the Slashdot crowd didn't like being asked to opt out.
Now, trifish, how can the Internet Archive evade copyright laws by reproducing the entirety of many copyrighted pages? Don't try and argue that they're a library. Libraries buy books; they don't photocopy them.
I have a screwdriver that I bought from the Home Depot (which is an evil American category-killing corporation) for $5 in money printed on broken treaties by equipment that runs on pure Iraqi gasoline. It works just fine to open and close the memory compartment.
I don't know where you were going with that anti-American rant, but to keep this on-topic, installing my memory is not a $40 job in my opinion.
I really, really doubt that consumers will buy their movie collections again in super-duper-DVD. Look at the SACD, which you can add to Sony's list of tech disappointments: regular CDs are Good Enough for the masses, and so SACDs and (more recently) DVD-Audio discs go unsold.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD will sell mainly because of storage demand. There's definitely a market for 30GB or 50GB of writable storage. The former will give Sony an excuse to release its movies THREE ways (DVD, UMD, Blu-ray) despite consumer apathy. I really doubt that you'll see ordinary DVDs disappear from Wal-Mart shelves as a direct result.
A software company can't afford to hire a development staff, and they're too poor to afford development software / education anyway. So they just make a copy of some open source program and sell it en masse on-line.
I tried doing something very similar on AOL -- I put down my age as some low number, and then they asked for my parents' (a/k/a my) credit card number for "parental consent." There's some law about tracking sub-13-year-olds on public internet sites nowadays.
I called Microsoft maybe 10 years ago, and they had a DJ playing songs. "That was Barry Manilow. This next one goes out to the folks in the Microsoft Word queue, where the average hold time is 48 minutes right now..."
HP's interruptions are terrible. "HP and AOL have teamed up to simplify the Internet for you!" every five minutes for hours on end. Intolerable.
"Our laptops cost more but you get the best service" is basically how IBM and Apple expect to sell pricey high-end laptops to professionals. My experience with Apple support was pretty lousy: after Apple diagnosed my hard drive as faulty, it took 18 days to get my laptop back with a new drive. Apple's tech reps changed their story every time I called -- one day it was "we received the part and need to install it" and the next day it was "we just need to order your new part!". Even Compaq turned things around within a week once I got through their awful phone support.
NeoOffice/J took up 450 MB of real memory the last time I ran it, which admittedly was in the OpenOffice 1.0 timeframe. I still get the idea that it loads the entire office suite into memory even if only one program is needed, which is as horribly wasteful as StarOffice has been since the 5.x series (when I started using it on OS/2).
So if NeoOffice/J is not actually initializing the JVM, what could it possibly be doing in the minute-plus that NeoOffice/J took to load on a G4/1.33GHz with 768 MB RAM?
So you're waiting for Google to finish implementing My Yahoo then? My Yahoo can read any RSS feed -- and it even has advertising, something else which Google promises to incorporate into their personalized home page portal.
I'm sure Google Fusion will be fantastic once it's out of beta. Really, I am.
Slashdot Mirror
Who would trust something as important as their e-mail to a beta service that could disappear, go down, or start charging at any moment? Hotmail's been around for ten years and, despite all its criticisms here, it still works without a cover-your-ass BETA tag on it.
Conspiracy theory: Google's testing out a payment system of its own. Who's to say they won't pull an Apple iTools and start rolling out a paid set of features for power users?
Why bother? Your autoreply is going to get marked as spam unless you support Sender ID.
Calling MTV "Music Television" is like calling AT&T "American Telephone and Telegraph." MTV long ago changed from just playing music videos to airing a lot of lifestyle programming. At some level, they identified NeoPets as something that they could use to continue going after their young demographic (note that MTV Networks also owns Nickelodeon). They don't even use the "Music Television" subtitle any more, having reverted to a KFC-like use of just their letters as a corporate name. When's the last time it was insightful to point out that MTV doesn't play videos any more?
Okay. Now how can Google and Yahoo (yes, Yahoo has a cache too) get away with this? They're clearly for-profit companies.
That acronym has already been taken by Fans Against Gordon, for racing fans that dislike Jeff Gordon. They have no web site per se but a Google Images search turns up their signature design.
I bought my copy of Katamari Damacy at Best Buy. It's not like it's that hard to find. If you can't find it at your local category-killer store, you can buy it on-line.
Coming up on Slashdot: How on-line shopping will kill off Best Buy and EB Games!
Just because you have a cache of something doesn't give you the right to redistribute it for commercial gain. The initial author still retains ownership.
Imagine if you had a device designed to record audio and reproduce it. That doesn't mean that you can resell your recordings; the original author retains ownership.
I'm not claiming that it is unethical to cache web pages, just that companies such as Google presume that they have the right to redistribute content to which they own no rights. The web is not like Usenet, where each server hosts others' posts; content is served by an author for as long as the author wants.
True. But that still doesn't make the book public domain solely because it's free.
If you consider your HTML content to be unproductible copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell is it publically accessible on the Web in the first place?
If you consider your music to be copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell it's being played on the radio in the first place?
If you consider your book to be copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell it's being lent out in the library in the first place?
If you consider your movie to be copyrighted material, might I ask why the hell it's being broadcast on HBO in the first place?
Just because something is available for free doesn't mean that the producer has granted you a permanent license to distribute it for commercial gain, as Google does with its cache.
Yes, I did. I got two responses, neither of which answered my question.
1. FAIR USE!
2. Google is merely providing a service. If you don't like it you can opt out.
The Google Cache is not fair use, as it reproduces the entirety of a web page's text for none of the purposes for which Fair Use is defined. (Under Fair Use you are entitled to use a portion of a copyrighted work, not the whole thing.)
The second one just cracks me up. I thought the Slashdot crowd didn't like being asked to opt out.
Now, trifish, how can the Internet Archive evade copyright laws by reproducing the entirety of many copyrighted pages? Don't try and argue that they're a library. Libraries buy books; they don't photocopy them.
Nokia 7280 with a wheel and no number buttons.
Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone with a rotary dial.
Enjoy!
Over $100/share for a search engine? Seems pretty clear to me.
I have a screwdriver that I bought from the Home Depot (which is an evil American category-killing corporation) for $5 in money printed on broken treaties by equipment that runs on pure Iraqi gasoline. It works just fine to open and close the memory compartment.
I don't know where you were going with that anti-American rant, but to keep this on-topic, installing my memory is not a $40 job in my opinion.
I really, really doubt that consumers will buy their movie collections again in super-duper-DVD. Look at the SACD, which you can add to Sony's list of tech disappointments: regular CDs are Good Enough for the masses, and so SACDs and (more recently) DVD-Audio discs go unsold.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD will sell mainly because of storage demand. There's definitely a market for 30GB or 50GB of writable storage. The former will give Sony an excuse to release its movies THREE ways (DVD, UMD, Blu-ray) despite consumer apathy. I really doubt that you'll see ordinary DVDs disappear from Wal-Mart shelves as a direct result.
A software company can't afford to hire a development staff, and they're too poor to afford development software / education anyway. So they just make a copy of some open source program and sell it en masse on-line.
Seems pretty similar to me.
That same page claims they'll charge you C$129 for "Spyware Installation." How much would it cost for spyware uninstallation?
MacMall gave me a 512 MB stick of memory with my PowerBook for "free." The only catch: a $40 installation fee.
To install memory on a PowerBook requires that you unscrew two tiny screws and slide a DIMM in. It's easily a one-minute job.
I tried doing something very similar on AOL -- I put down my age as some low number, and then they asked for my parents' (a/k/a my) credit card number for "parental consent." There's some law about tracking sub-13-year-olds on public internet sites nowadays.
Because they're text with links, along with sponsored text links that Overture (now part of Yahoo!) invented before Google AdWords came around.
Wow. How good is it at that?
I called Microsoft maybe 10 years ago, and they had a DJ playing songs. "That was Barry Manilow. This next one goes out to the folks in the Microsoft Word queue, where the average hold time is 48 minutes right now..."
HP's interruptions are terrible. "HP and AOL have teamed up to simplify the Internet for you!" every five minutes for hours on end. Intolerable.
"Our laptops cost more but you get the best service" is basically how IBM and Apple expect to sell pricey high-end laptops to professionals. My experience with Apple support was pretty lousy: after Apple diagnosed my hard drive as faulty, it took 18 days to get my laptop back with a new drive. Apple's tech reps changed their story every time I called -- one day it was "we received the part and need to install it" and the next day it was "we just need to order your new part!". Even Compaq turned things around within a week once I got through their awful phone support.
NeoOffice/J took up 450 MB of real memory the last time I ran it, which admittedly was in the OpenOffice 1.0 timeframe. I still get the idea that it loads the entire office suite into memory even if only one program is needed, which is as horribly wasteful as StarOffice has been since the 5.x series (when I started using it on OS/2).
So if NeoOffice/J is not actually initializing the JVM, what could it possibly be doing in the minute-plus that NeoOffice/J took to load on a G4/1.33GHz with 768 MB RAM?
So you're waiting for Google to finish implementing My Yahoo then? My Yahoo can read any RSS feed -- and it even has advertising, something else which Google promises to incorporate into their personalized home page portal.
I'm sure Google Fusion will be fantastic once it's out of beta. Really, I am.