but by the same token, how many of the 15,000 against the settlement or the 7,000 "I hate M$FT" were written by employees of AOL/Time Warner/Netscape?
Re:Slashdot News Flash - Katz: the ultimate troll
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
Oh good. I'm not the only one who's noticed that 90% of feedback on a Katz article is shooting down everything he says. The man does provoke many a great conversation, but only by trolling and flaming and somehow being able to get it posted on the front page. Kudos to you, Jon - you're the epitome of what all the AC Trolls want to be.
Technically, I don't need LEDs to show me when my drive is working. I don't need a mousepad with a picture. I don't need a 19" colour monitor, when a 13" monochrome will do.
Lighten up. It's not like they're telling you that you have to do it. The site clearly states that you'll probably destroy your harddrive. What do you care what I do to my boring beige box?
I'm still rather enjoying my ATI Radeon 32mb. I mean, sure, I'd love to have the biggest/best/fastest thing around, but nVidia keeps making these damn things faster than the old ones become obsolete (or even standard equipment for most). I don't know anyone who bothered upgrading to a GeForce 3 from a GeForce 2, so who the hell would go to a GeForce 4 now? I mean, the GeForce 3 came out less than a year ago. I personally am not willing to spend $600 per year just on video cards, when the performance gain is barely marginal, and nobody's writing games to take advantage of the new bells and whistles.
if you actually did mean 0.015 cents per meg, and not $0.015 per meg, that's perfectly agreeable by me. If I could get good service (what I have now is pretty damn good...no complaints here) and pay, say $20-$30 per month just for the connection, then add a few dollars per gig (downstream and upstream). The flat charge is less, so people who just check mail and weather get off easy, most of us come out about the same, and people running ftps and pulling through 7 or 8 gigs a day worth of mp3s and warez get nailed.
The difference between other services and high speed internet providers is that the other services set their rates appropriately and grow with their customer base. If your local small grocery store had 500 people trying to shop at the same time all the time, would they tell the people with the fullest shopping carts that it was their fault? Would they make them pay a premium? Or would they learn to order more stock, and maybe expand their store? These providers have finally realized that there's no money to be made by reselling something for a fraction of their cost, and they want all of their money back at once. Cogeco (yet another competitor to Rogers, Shaw, et al) no longer offers free do-it-yourself installs. They want to charge me $60 to send some slack-jawed tech monkey to my house so he can ask me what a linux is and try to figure out how to install their win-only software. He'll make a 1/2 hour call to tech support while he's there so he can find out what he's supposed to do, then he'll leave. I'll still have to install it myself (if they even let me use the service on a non-windows platform) and sit on hold with phone jockeys to get the settings for myself, and I'll STILL be charged for the install. Because of this, and their proposed rate changes, I will not get a cable modem. I will instead get a dsl from the damn communists at Bell, who will at least let me install the modem myself, and are running a nice promotion right now. All in all, I'll save about $160 CDN in the first six months, get service that's just as fast, and not have the hassle to deal with.
I agree 100%. But here in Canada, I have Bell for phone service. They want me to pay $14 a month for visual call waiting (so I know who's beeping in on me). They also want me to pay $55 to activate my new line. I have no other choices. There's long distance competition, and so I can get unlimited long distance within Canada for $20. But my only choice for local service is Bell, or a cell phone. And in my area, the cell service is patchy at best (turn a corner, drop a call). So I'm stuck with a phone that costs more per month than my dsl. Go figure.
I have absolutely no problem with the isp capping my rate. They do now. But that fact is that they're offering a service they can't sustain. They couldn't from the start. Now they want to make us all believe that it's our fault. When I signed up it was because I was offered an "unlimited, always on" connection. They knew in the first place that they didn't have the bandwidth to give to as many customers as they had. They just assumed that even though they marketed the service as "always on", people wouldn't leave it on all the time. Their marketing definition of "unlimited" was different than the definition the rest of us use. They were dishonest, and now they want to put spin on it to make it look like it's the users who are causing the problems. They should at least own up to their own screw ups.
But when I buy 4 liters of milk, the dairy industry can't tell me how fast I'm allowed to drink it. If I pay for "unlimited internet" (as stated in my Sympatico DSL agreement) I expect exactly that. If they start telling me that "unlimited internet" really means "unlimited email and web browsing, but we'll have to charge you more if you want to download cd images and movies and play Diablo 2" then it's no longer unlimited, and I'll go elsewhere.
That "van Riel" guy is a total karma whore. Everything he's posted is modded "5 - informative". He must have like 90 points just from this one discussion! What's up with that?;)
Ok, sure - sooner or later, somebody WILL crack the protection layer and get raw hardware access. Everyone knows it, since I've seen about 80 posts so far saying how fast it will happen. So then what? Everyone's so firm that this will happen. That it MUST happen, for the greater good or something. But what will anyone do with it? Are there going to be any apps that make the PS2/Linux kit a must have? Will somebody develop some breakthrough game? Or will we see more of the consoles running apache that we see now with the Dreamcast? "Yeah, well I have a PS2 running apache! And all I have to do is boot from a dvd and keep all my served files under 8Mb so they fit on a memory card." Bah. Nobody will develop games for it. It'll be nothing more than a novelty that gets stuffed away in the closet when you realize that you can do way more on a PC that, for the same price, has far superior hardware. It's like watching a bunch of cats, scratching at a closed door, and as soon as somebody opens it, they sniff around and walk away.
Ok, since I got modded 'flamebait' for my starting this thread, let me try a different approach. ICQ throws ad banners at us too, but they still let Trillian (and like 20 other clients) connect with no problems. And AOL owns ICQ as well. Why would they only target AOL IM clones? MSN Messenger (iirc) uses ad banners too, and they don't kill other clients on the network.
the monkeys from "Project X" maybe...
on
Think And Click
·
· Score: 5, Funny
...scientists have discovered neural technology that allowed a monkey to control a mouse cursor...
That's right. AOL 7.0 is all new, and easier than ever!
I'm not saying they should just roll over and die. Maybe they can work out a deal with Trillian to put in the AOL ad banners. Maybe that would piss of Trillian users and kill the program anyways. But changing your protocols every other day to keep people off the network is a bad idea. Besides making your regular users sit through updates constantly, they've gotta be introducing bugs into the code. Sure, they have to satisfy investors, but not at the cost of destroying their product.
I'd have to agree about the targeting. When I go to any number of websites and get X10 ads or any number of other annoying ads, it's annoying. When banner ads are targeted (hey, slashdot is doing *something* right) they're tolerable. I occasionally click on ads here, since they're all invariably geeky.
Actually, I'm glad to see that response. I had the same reaction when they cut off non-IE users from MSN. "Hey, it's their service, they can do what they want." I'd just prefer to see Trillian stick it out and win this one, since it's such a great piece of software.
Not so much reinventing the wheel. For many people, they don't have all of their friends using the same IM client. Trillian interconnects yahoo, msn, aol, icq, and irc all in one rather tidy interface. It's a hell of a lot nicer than running four IM clients plus and irc client.
Re:A matter of security?!?
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You forgot one. It's a matter of revenue. AOL IM serves ads. Trillian doesn't serve ads for AOL. If you use Trillian, AOL doesn't get ad revenues. The only security they care about is investor security.
Re:Are their servers anyway.
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Well Microsoft owns the servers that run Hotmail (and Passport, and MSN, and so on) so should they force everyone to use IE to check their Hotmail accounts? AOL lets people use the IM service for free, but they serve up ads to everyone using it. They're just upset that people can use their service without them making ad revenues.
Trillian is a great program. I don't use the AOL IM portion of it, but since work forces us to use MSN messenger, I use Trillian so I can run ICQ as well. And the interface is far better than those of any of the messengers it uses, except for ICQ. Keep up the good work, Cerulean!
Slashdot Mirror
I was looking forward to Slashdotting the vote!
However, I was *not* looking forward to Bill Gates running for president and all of MSFT's employees each voting hundreds of thousands of times.
From their website:
Video downloading has been suspended while we are being Slashdotted. Got a lot of bandwidth to spare? We would love to talk!
doh! why must we always do this?
but by the same token, how many of the 15,000 against the settlement or the 7,000 "I hate M$FT" were written by employees of AOL/Time Warner/Netscape?
Oh good. I'm not the only one who's noticed that 90% of feedback on a Katz article is shooting down everything he says. The man does provoke many a great conversation, but only by trolling and flaming and somehow being able to get it posted on the front page. Kudos to you, Jon - you're the epitome of what all the AC Trolls want to be.
Technically, I don't need LEDs to show me when my drive is working. I don't need a mousepad with a picture. I don't need a 19" colour monitor, when a 13" monochrome will do.
Lighten up. It's not like they're telling you that you have to do it. The site clearly states that you'll probably destroy your harddrive. What do you care what I do to my boring beige box?
Fame and glory? That's lame. They should give away free copies of their OS. Now THAT would be a prize!
that's "metapOd"
you were close though
and I think "whatever Japanese company owns Pokemon" would be Nintendo.
I'm still rather enjoying my ATI Radeon 32mb. I mean, sure, I'd love to have the biggest/best/fastest thing around, but nVidia keeps making these damn things faster than the old ones become obsolete (or even standard equipment for most). I don't know anyone who bothered upgrading to a GeForce 3 from a GeForce 2, so who the hell would go to a GeForce 4 now? I mean, the GeForce 3 came out less than a year ago. I personally am not willing to spend $600 per year just on video cards, when the performance gain is barely marginal, and nobody's writing games to take advantage of the new bells and whistles.
if you actually did mean 0.015 cents per meg, and not $0.015 per meg, that's perfectly agreeable by me. If I could get good service (what I have now is pretty damn good...no complaints here) and pay, say $20-$30 per month just for the connection, then add a few dollars per gig (downstream and upstream). The flat charge is less, so people who just check mail and weather get off easy, most of us come out about the same, and people running ftps and pulling through 7 or 8 gigs a day worth of mp3s and warez get nailed.
The difference between other services and high speed internet providers is that the other services set their rates appropriately and grow with their customer base. If your local small grocery store had 500 people trying to shop at the same time all the time, would they tell the people with the fullest shopping carts that it was their fault? Would they make them pay a premium? Or would they learn to order more stock, and maybe expand their store? These providers have finally realized that there's no money to be made by reselling something for a fraction of their cost, and they want all of their money back at once. Cogeco (yet another competitor to Rogers, Shaw, et al) no longer offers free do-it-yourself installs. They want to charge me $60 to send some slack-jawed tech monkey to my house so he can ask me what a linux is and try to figure out how to install their win-only software. He'll make a 1/2 hour call to tech support while he's there so he can find out what he's supposed to do, then he'll leave. I'll still have to install it myself (if they even let me use the service on a non-windows platform) and sit on hold with phone jockeys to get the settings for myself, and I'll STILL be charged for the install. Because of this, and their proposed rate changes, I will not get a cable modem. I will instead get a dsl from the damn communists at Bell, who will at least let me install the modem myself, and are running a nice promotion right now. All in all, I'll save about $160 CDN in the first six months, get service that's just as fast, and not have the hassle to deal with.
I agree 100%. But here in Canada, I have Bell for phone service. They want me to pay $14 a month for visual call waiting (so I know who's beeping in on me). They also want me to pay $55 to activate my new line. I have no other choices. There's long distance competition, and so I can get unlimited long distance within Canada for $20. But my only choice for local service is Bell, or a cell phone. And in my area, the cell service is patchy at best (turn a corner, drop a call). So I'm stuck with a phone that costs more per month than my dsl. Go figure.
I have absolutely no problem with the isp capping my rate. They do now. But that fact is that they're offering a service they can't sustain. They couldn't from the start. Now they want to make us all believe that it's our fault. When I signed up it was because I was offered an "unlimited, always on" connection. They knew in the first place that they didn't have the bandwidth to give to as many customers as they had. They just assumed that even though they marketed the service as "always on", people wouldn't leave it on all the time. Their marketing definition of "unlimited" was different than the definition the rest of us use. They were dishonest, and now they want to put spin on it to make it look like it's the users who are causing the problems. They should at least own up to their own screw ups.
But when I buy 4 liters of milk, the dairy industry can't tell me how fast I'm allowed to drink it. If I pay for "unlimited internet" (as stated in my Sympatico DSL agreement) I expect exactly that. If they start telling me that "unlimited internet" really means "unlimited email and web browsing, but we'll have to charge you more if you want to download cd images and movies and play Diablo 2" then it's no longer unlimited, and I'll go elsewhere.
That "van Riel" guy is a total karma whore. Everything he's posted is modded "5 - informative". He must have like 90 points just from this one discussion! What's up with that? ;)
Ok, sure - sooner or later, somebody WILL crack the protection layer and get raw hardware access. Everyone knows it, since I've seen about 80 posts so far saying how fast it will happen. So then what? Everyone's so firm that this will happen. That it MUST happen, for the greater good or something. But what will anyone do with it? Are there going to be any apps that make the PS2/Linux kit a must have? Will somebody develop some breakthrough game? Or will we see more of the consoles running apache that we see now with the Dreamcast? "Yeah, well I have a PS2 running apache! And all I have to do is boot from a dvd and keep all my served files under 8Mb so they fit on a memory card." Bah. Nobody will develop games for it. It'll be nothing more than a novelty that gets stuffed away in the closet when you realize that you can do way more on a PC that, for the same price, has far superior hardware. It's like watching a bunch of cats, scratching at a closed door, and as soon as somebody opens it, they sniff around and walk away.
That's not a black hole. That's Uranus!
Zing!
Ok, since I got modded 'flamebait' for my starting this thread, let me try a different approach. ICQ throws ad banners at us too, but they still let Trillian (and like 20 other clients) connect with no problems. And AOL owns ICQ as well. Why would they only target AOL IM clones? MSN Messenger (iirc) uses ad banners too, and they don't kill other clients on the network.
...scientists have discovered neural technology that allowed a monkey to control a mouse cursor...
That's right. AOL 7.0 is all new, and easier than ever!
I'm not saying they should just roll over and die. Maybe they can work out a deal with Trillian to put in the AOL ad banners. Maybe that would piss of Trillian users and kill the program anyways. But changing your protocols every other day to keep people off the network is a bad idea. Besides making your regular users sit through updates constantly, they've gotta be introducing bugs into the code. Sure, they have to satisfy investors, but not at the cost of destroying their product.
I'd have to agree about the targeting. When I go to any number of websites and get X10 ads or any number of other annoying ads, it's annoying. When banner ads are targeted (hey, slashdot is doing *something* right) they're tolerable. I occasionally click on ads here, since they're all invariably geeky.
Actually, I'm glad to see that response. I had the same reaction when they cut off non-IE users from MSN. "Hey, it's their service, they can do what they want." I'd just prefer to see Trillian stick it out and win this one, since it's such a great piece of software.
Not so much reinventing the wheel. For many people, they don't have all of their friends using the same IM client. Trillian interconnects yahoo, msn, aol, icq, and irc all in one rather tidy interface. It's a hell of a lot nicer than running four IM clients plus and irc client.
You forgot one. It's a matter of revenue. AOL IM serves ads. Trillian doesn't serve ads for AOL. If you use Trillian, AOL doesn't get ad revenues. The only security they care about is investor security.
Well Microsoft owns the servers that run Hotmail (and Passport, and MSN, and so on) so should they force everyone to use IE to check their Hotmail accounts? AOL lets people use the IM service for free, but they serve up ads to everyone using it. They're just upset that people can use their service without them making ad revenues.
Trillian is a great program. I don't use the AOL IM portion of it, but since work forces us to use MSN messenger, I use Trillian so I can run ICQ as well. And the interface is far better than those of any of the messengers it uses, except for ICQ. Keep up the good work, Cerulean!