Do you realize that your 136-node processor would draw 4-6 kilowatts of power (and so have to dissapate the same amount of heat!), depending on what processor architecture was used?
Would you name all the popular programs you can that scale well onto even 2 processors, and then define the word "parallelizable"?
Would you calculate the amount of time (expressed in trillions of years, exponential notation, or however you prefer) it would take to brute force a mainstream 128-bit encryption algorithm on this cluster?
Are you aware that current sound cards use 16 or 24-bit, 2, 4, or 5 channel, 44.1 (not 144) Khz technology? (I'm probably missing lots of combinations myself).
Would you please do a Google search for "Nyquist", and then explain to us exactly why you want "920 KHz" sound output?
Do you understand now why nobody is willing to "give you a chip plant"?
Do you mind if I use your post as an example, the next time someone else with a 4 or 5 digit UID complains that all the more recent Slashdot accounts are driving the quality of discussion downhill?
How exactly is "murder" an argument from the absurd? It's something that happens every day, not some hypothetical uber-crime that we may never hear of in our lifetimes.
Civil damages aren't exactly the best deterrent to crime, either. Do you think all the muggers out there are maintaining stockpiles of cash or buying insurance to pay restitution with if they get caught?
Windows' GUI doesn't look 95% like Windows GUI anymore.
But more than that, I love the fact that people can take a static view of history, even in the face of one of the most rapidly changing aspects (computers and how we interact with them) of human society. Windows 95 was released at the end of 1995. It is now a little over 6 years since everybody and his mom began switching to what you now think of as the ubiquitous "Windows GUI". I'm sure Microsoft would love to say, "Okay, we've got it perfect now, so let's everybody stop changing anything," but it's just not going to work that way. If the "Windows GUI" lasts the rest of 10 years (and God, please let them at least add standard virtual desktops if that happens) then it will be an incredibly long lasting user interface. Does that mean it should be immutable? That, even given past switches of hundreds of millions of people to different but superior interfaces, no further change should occur?
Wait, you're a libertarian, not an anarchist, right? If you're a libertarian, shouldn't you be happy with the rights of a landlord to bring criminal punishment upon a tenant for breach of contract? It just so happens that this landlord is really big, and the contract you have to obey to live here is really long.
Exactly what line on their income statement (man, I hope that's not a temporary link...) does the loss due to piracy fit into? How could they write off such a loss without writing the creation of the pirated software as a revenue in the first place? Does the "lost software" appear on their balance sheet anywhere?
People talk about "Microsoft using its monopoly power to..." without recognizing that the only power Microsoft has is the price at which they sell their product.
That's not quite true, but it's a good start. You realize, with their market share, that this power means that Microsoft could instantly destroy Dell, Gateway, Compaq, or any other computer manufacturing company they choose by simply raising that OEM's prices through the roof? That they could bring about such a destruction a bit more slowly by simply raising OEM costs for Windows and Offices up to the retail price? And that the OEMs know this, and so are forced to sign whatever anticompetitive agreement Microsoft wants in order to stay alive?
If you're so libertarian that you don't have any problem with abuse of monopoly power, then what's your problem with the government? Just tell yourself, "The government owns all land within it's borders, and 'property deeds' are just end user license agreements that let me use the land as long as I follow the government's laws." Then you can think of the government as just the luckiest of the big corporations, you can happily bend over for them too, and everything should be A-OK.
The "open source engine, closed content" model sounds good... but is "art" the only thing you can think of to sell? Do we all really go that long between playing games with an interesting plot?
The problem is that for what they are paying, you tend to get two kinds of candidates: starry-eyed idealists naieve enough to think they can "make a difference", and people who couldn't find a job doing anything else.
So cops are like teachers, except they get shot at slightly more often?
I've been impatiently awaiting Radeon 8500 support, simply because I had no idea there were any dualhead 7500 cards, and I certainly didn't know they were supported by Linux. Xinerama, I assume? Would you please email me a copy of your XF86Config file?
I own a PDA, a PCS phone, a TI-85 calculator, and a 2.1 Mpixel camera. I would like to have a portable MP3 player, GPS receiver, TV remote, and handheld computer (no, PalmOS doesn't quite cut it for general purpose software) as well. I am swamped with a multitude of electronic gadgets, with more to come, and yet my lowly mechanical engineering background leaves me unable to say why exactly these things can't all be done by the same device. By your use of the phrase "standard all in one hand held", I assume you know where I can find such a device. Please share this information. Thank you.
Frequency is important, too. The earth's natural field takes tens (or is it hundreds?) of millions of years to flip around; the power line's field is changing every 1/60 of a second. There's a reason you can wrap an inductor around the line to get juice, but can't do the same around the equator.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly doubt there's any detectable biological effects from power lines, but that's something that would have to be proven by double-blind experiment; your calculations aren't enough.
I am writing to register my disappointment at the proposed Final Judgement settlement in the U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust case.
The most glaring deficiency of the proposed settlement, of course, is that it is utterly ineffectual at even elaborating on the existing legal restrictions that antitrust law places on Microsoft. Doubtless the DoJ has been flooded with explanations of these problems, but I refer you to Dan Kegel's excellent essay on the subject (already submitted as a Tunney act comment, and archived at http://www.kegel.com/remedy/remedy2.html) as the most intelligent elaboration of the settlement's loopholes and problems which I have seen. Because Microsoft has a record of finding such technical loopholes to legal restrictions (or, failing that, ignoring the restrictions outright), it is my belief that the proposed settlement will do nothing to prevent Microsoft from continuing it's current use of the Windows monopoly to maintain and extend that monopoly market share through illegal licensing and exclusionary agreements.
In order to prevent Microsoft from abusing it's control over monopoly software products in the future, nothing short of uniform licensing for all it's products will suffice. Microsoft must not be allowed to license it's products differently to different customers, because even in the most benign cases of such special licensing it has and will continue to hold special pricing and special allowances as a bully's stick with which to control the behavior of other software and hardware companies. When I can get a Windows license via Dell computer more cheaply than I can get it from a retail store, I am coerced into buying from Dell (and other major PC assemblers), and they in turn must agree to whatever illegal restrictions Microsoft imposes or risk their very survival. Microsoft is aware of this power they have, and they use it. It must be removed. Microsoft must be required to release it's software at a constant price for any customer, OEM or individual, and they must be prevented from allowing any restrictions on the use or resale of that software beyond what is allowed by copyright law. Nothing less will suffice to prevent the continued illegal exploitation of their market position. Even this restriction is necessary but not sufficient; it should be added to the proposed settlement and should not replace it.
There is one thing that I feel must be added to Mr. Kegel's comments, hich in his essay was completely absent: even if the proposed settlement were completely free from loopholes, it would be insufficient. Microsoft repeatedly broke both U.S. law and court orders, and has profited to the extent of tens of billions of dollars and dozens of destroyed and crippled competitors in the process. If the only punishment they face is a set of restrictions designed to make the continuation of these acts harder, then they really have not been punished at all. The settlement against Microsoft must "deny to the defendant the fruits of its statutory violation", or it does not act as a disincentive to further violations at all.
The most direct way of enacting such a punishment is simply to fine Microsoft at a level commensurate with their criminal gains. Fortunately, Microsoft holds a cash (and cash equivalents) reserve of over thirty billion dollars, and so such a fine could be levied without requiring any business-disrupting liquidation on their part. Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated that they are motivated by money and not by the law; they will cease illegal behavior once it becomes financially unwise, and not a moment sooner.
---
Roy Stogner
You could have just pointed to the cartoon and let us see it unprepared, but I'm sure it will be twice as funny now that I've read the transcript!
That was a good start, but next time, try explaining the joke, too: "And so when the guy says Amazon.com turned a profit, it's so ridiculous that this super computer gets burned out, because that's how ridiculous Amazon turning a profit would be!" I know User Friendly cartoons are already a continuous laugh riot on their own, but if you'll follow this simple advice you can help make them even more hilarious!
Wall Street seems to be full of them: people buying stocks based on the "bigger sucker" theory, hoping that whether the stocks were worth anything or not there will be a bigger sucker to sell them to later. The whole dot-com crash was due to the failure of this theory: eventually you reach the biggest sucker.
However, there are still a few people out there who actually look at company earnings and (wait for it...) dividends before buying a stock. If you've got a few spare bucks you want to gamble with, being one of these "investors" may not sound like fun, but people playing with their retirement funds might want to give it a try.
Jabber is just like AIM and Gnutella and ICQ, there's just a backbone you have to get on.
No, there isn't. If I want to send you a Jabber message, the only computers involved are my Jabber server, your Jabber server, my computer, and your computer. No central server involved. Lots of people have jabber.com IM addresses, but only because there aren't enough ISPs running IM servers yet.
Your IM server should be just like your email server - it needs to be on a computer that won't go down, otherwise you miss messages. I don't think Jabber has anything like the DNS-integrated failover capabilities that email servers have, which is a problem, but not a huge one. I don't recall ever seeing a jabber.com server outage, just regular Jabber transport outages as AOL's blocking policies change.
The big thing is that, just like email and Gnutella, nobody has control over the backbone. AOL can, at any time, decide "I'm taking my ball and (going home/forcing you to watch 30 seconds of ads before logging on/closing down the service because MSN beat us/whatever), and tens of millions of IM users are forced to follow suit. With Jabber, just as with email, you can pick your provider (or start your own server on a static hostname like you suggested), and if someone else's provider pulls something stupid it doesn't affect you a bit.
I do think, in the strictest libertarian sense, that AOL has the right to say who gets to play on their servers and who doesn't. But in a practical sense, it's an attempt to seize a monopoly, it's stupid from an engineering perspective, it's stupid from a business perspective, and it's just way too reminiscent of the bad old days when everybody wasted resources developing their own proprietary WAN and none of them talked to each other. AOL managed to beat out Prodigy, Compuserve, etc. in part because they were quick to become part of the internet and move past that stage. It's not pretty to see them testing those waters again.
You do realise the difference. You pay for your net connection. You don't pay for your AIM connection. By agreeing (indirectly) to view ads, you are funding AIM.
I do realise the difference, which is why I supplimented this flawed analogy with the perfect analogy (to email services) which you deleted. I can send email to an AOL email user without using an approved client; why can't I do the same with an instant message? The answer is simply that AOL didn't capture enough of the email marketshare to attempt to entrap it; they did capture (or purchase via ICQ) enough of the instant messaging marketshare to do so.
Unless you come up with a better system than a proven centralized one, what can you do.
I can wait for someone else to come up with a better system than a proven centralized one. Jabber works the same way email works, with no "central post office". Backwards compatibility, if it wasn't thwarted by AOL, would then allow users who so desired to transition to this new system without losing their old contacts. In the end, AOL would only have to host AOL users on their own servers, and would retain the money-making aspects of their system (an incentive for more AOL subscribers) while dropping the money-losing aspects (What's the going rate on ad impressions today? Probably not enough to pay for the AIM server maintenance).
I'm an AOL stockholder; I don't want them throwing money away. But they're throwing it away, because they're too big to have been bitten hard enough by the dot-com lesson of how rarely selling services at a loss (or for ad money alone) makes sense. The only reason they're still running their system like this is because they believe they can keep their users a captive audience forever. It won't work that way: Microsoft is much better at the captive user game, and a few generations of Windows with "easy built in MSN instant messaging" will prove it.
You don't think you were modded by someone who actually read your post and thought about it, do you?
It's been a couple days; I'm curious as to how much attention is still being paid to this thread. Will I be taking the three point karma hit? Will jamie decide to rip 150 points away in one fell swoop? Anyway, consider this my vote cast for "we need front page discussion on why the moderation system is broken and how to fix it". This thread is offtopic because there's no better place to put it, not because it didn't need to be said.
If they opened up the "good protocol", you realise that people would block out ads and do whatver they want with it, on their largest platforms.
And God forbid they should be able to do that! Why, choosing to get an instant messaging account without having to watch AOL advertisements would be as bad as being able to get an ISP without seeing their ads regularly.
Oh, wait, we can do that.
PLUS (..plus mind you), you are using something that they provide for free.
No, I'm not. Their users are using something that they provide for free. I'm just sending those users messages, using a jabber server that AOL does not provide. Should I have to view an advertisement before I send email to an @aol.com address, too?
So before you critise them, think about what they are giving you, what you are paying for and what it costs to them.
"What it costs to them" is the direct result of them choosing a needlessly centralized messaging architecture (in order to make sure that their IM users remain trapped eyeballs), and that's not my problem. You'd think that after they'd successfully learned the "AOL users might want to send email to non-AOL users" lesson they might not make the same mistake twice.
Grip is just about as easy as it gets. It comes with Red Hat 7.2 now, preconfigured for ogg, preconfigured to query the freedb servers for tracks and titles. I'm still using it with lame, but when I move everything to ogg it makes that easy, too, with "Auto-rip on insert" and "Auto-eject when finished" boxes checked.
What kind of speakers do you have?
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I can hear the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and the original CD (192kbps CBR or 160kbps VBR are good enough for me), however the difference isn't nearly so great as the difference between playing the music on $30 vs. $100 speakers. You can get decent computer speakers today (if you're not an audiophile and don't need very high volume) for as little as $60, but the prevalence of 128kbps recordings on the internet suggests to me that most of these people are still listening to music on the little white buzzers that came with their computer.
provides API (though not the nicer one) for writting your own client
Sure, if you want to write a crippled AIM clone to rope a larger set of users into AOL's IM network. If you want to actually create a compatible alternative to AOL's network, expect to be blocked at every turn.
Damned shortsighted fools. If the rest of the internet worked like this we'd still be dialing in to BBSes.
Their stocks steadily went down as has been the trend looking at their entire stock history.
Their stock peaked at 20 times it's IPO price, shockingly quickly. Obviously (to anyone not following the "bigger sucker" theory of investment) it was only headed back down from there when people came to their senses. I think if you take the split into account, they're actually trading ~10% above their IPO price again, which IMHO is a pretty fair valuation finally.
According to the FHS,/usr is supposed to be mountable as a shared (among computers of the same OS & architecture) read-only filesystem. Needless to say, putting per-computer configuration files in/usr/X11R6/lib/X11 would make that impossible. However, making/usr/X11R6/lib/X11 a symlink (or leaving symlinks of individual files there like Red Hat does) solves backwards compatibility for programs that expect to see such a misdesigned configuration.
I have no idea where slackware's coming from. Once you're shuffling around configuration files, why not shuffle them into the directory (/etc) intended for their storage?
1) Where are the hardware specs? I've never done any driver programming, but I'd like to help.
2) Does it have dualhead support for the 8500 yet? I can wait months for 3D if it's coming eventually, but I'd very much like to hook up my second monitor tonight.
If you have 10 jobs to fill and 100 applicants, you get to be real picky about what kind of people you accept. 10 jobs and 11 applicants doesn't let you be so choosy.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you realize that your 136-node processor would draw 4-6 kilowatts of power (and so have to dissapate the same amount of heat!), depending on what processor architecture was used?
Would you name all the popular programs you can that scale well onto even 2 processors, and then define the word "parallelizable"?
Would you calculate the amount of time (expressed in trillions of years, exponential notation, or however you prefer) it would take to brute force a mainstream 128-bit encryption algorithm on this cluster?
Are you aware that current sound cards use 16 or 24-bit, 2, 4, or 5 channel, 44.1 (not 144) Khz technology? (I'm probably missing lots of combinations myself).
Would you please do a Google search for "Nyquist", and then explain to us exactly why you want "920 KHz" sound output?
Do you understand now why nobody is willing to "give you a chip plant"?
Do you mind if I use your post as an example, the next time someone else with a 4 or 5 digit UID complains that all the more recent Slashdot accounts are driving the quality of discussion downhill?
How exactly is "murder" an argument from the absurd? It's something that happens every day, not some hypothetical uber-crime that we may never hear of in our lifetimes.
Civil damages aren't exactly the best deterrent to crime, either. Do you think all the muggers out there are maintaining stockpiles of cash or buying insurance to pay restitution with if they get caught?
Windows' GUI doesn't look 95% like Windows GUI anymore.
But more than that, I love the fact that people can take a static view of history, even in the face of one of the most rapidly changing aspects (computers and how we interact with them) of human society. Windows 95 was released at the end of 1995. It is now a little over 6 years since everybody and his mom began switching to what you now think of as the ubiquitous "Windows GUI". I'm sure Microsoft would love to say, "Okay, we've got it perfect now, so let's everybody stop changing anything," but it's just not going to work that way. If the "Windows GUI" lasts the rest of 10 years (and God, please let them at least add standard virtual desktops if that happens) then it will be an incredibly long lasting user interface. Does that mean it should be immutable? That, even given past switches of hundreds of millions of people to different but superior interfaces, no further change should occur?
I hope not.
They and only they can put you in jail.
Wait, you're a libertarian, not an anarchist, right? If you're a libertarian, shouldn't you be happy with the rights of a landlord to bring criminal punishment upon a tenant for breach of contract? It just so happens that this landlord is really big, and the contract you have to obey to live here is really long.
Exactly what line on their income statement (man, I hope that's not a temporary link...) does the loss due to piracy fit into? How could they write off such a loss without writing the creation of the pirated software as a revenue in the first place? Does the "lost software" appear on their balance sheet anywhere?
People talk about "Microsoft using its monopoly power to..." without recognizing that the only power Microsoft has is the price at which they sell their product.
That's not quite true, but it's a good start. You realize, with their market share, that this power means that Microsoft could instantly destroy Dell, Gateway, Compaq, or any other computer manufacturing company they choose by simply raising that OEM's prices through the roof? That they could bring about such a destruction a bit more slowly by simply raising OEM costs for Windows and Offices up to the retail price? And that the OEMs know this, and so are forced to sign whatever anticompetitive agreement Microsoft wants in order to stay alive?
If you're so libertarian that you don't have any problem with abuse of monopoly power, then what's your problem with the government? Just tell yourself, "The government owns all land within it's borders, and 'property deeds' are just end user license agreements that let me use the land as long as I follow the government's laws." Then you can think of the government as just the luckiest of the big corporations, you can happily bend over for them too, and everything should be A-OK.
The "open source engine, closed content" model sounds good... but is "art" the only thing you can think of to sell? Do we all really go that long between playing games with an interesting plot?
The problem is that for what they are paying, you tend to get two kinds of candidates: starry-eyed idealists naieve enough to think they can "make a difference", and people who couldn't find a job doing anything else.
So cops are like teachers, except they get shot at slightly more often?
I've been impatiently awaiting Radeon 8500 support, simply because I had no idea there were any dualhead 7500 cards, and I certainly didn't know they were supported by Linux. Xinerama, I assume? Would you please email me a copy of your XF86Config file?
I own a PDA, a PCS phone, a TI-85 calculator, and a 2.1 Mpixel camera. I would like to have a portable MP3 player, GPS receiver, TV remote, and handheld computer (no, PalmOS doesn't quite cut it for general purpose software) as well. I am swamped with a multitude of electronic gadgets, with more to come, and yet my lowly mechanical engineering background leaves me unable to say why exactly these things can't all be done by the same device. By your use of the phrase "standard all in one hand held", I assume you know where I can find such a device. Please share this information. Thank you.
Frequency is important, too. The earth's natural field takes tens (or is it hundreds?) of millions of years to flip around; the power line's field is changing every 1/60 of a second. There's a reason you can wrap an inductor around the line to get juice, but can't do the same around the equator.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly doubt there's any detectable biological effects from power lines, but that's something that would have to be proven by double-blind experiment; your calculations aren't enough.
Here's my contribution:
---
I am writing to register my disappointment at the proposed Final Judgement settlement in the U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust case.
The most glaring deficiency of the proposed settlement, of course, is that it is utterly ineffectual at even elaborating on the existing legal restrictions that antitrust law places on Microsoft. Doubtless the DoJ has been flooded with explanations of these problems, but I refer you to Dan Kegel's excellent essay on the subject (already submitted as a Tunney act comment, and archived at http://www.kegel.com/remedy/remedy2.html) as the most intelligent elaboration of the settlement's loopholes and problems which I have seen. Because Microsoft has a record of finding such technical loopholes to legal restrictions (or, failing that, ignoring the restrictions outright), it is my belief that the proposed settlement will do nothing to prevent Microsoft from continuing it's current use of the Windows monopoly to maintain and extend that monopoly market share through illegal licensing and exclusionary agreements.
In order to prevent Microsoft from abusing it's control over monopoly software products in the future, nothing short of uniform licensing for all it's products will suffice. Microsoft must not be allowed to license it's products differently to different customers, because even in the most benign cases of such special licensing it has and will continue to hold special pricing and special allowances as a bully's stick with which to control the behavior of other software and hardware companies. When I can get a Windows license via Dell computer more cheaply than I can get it from a retail store, I am coerced into buying from Dell (and other major PC assemblers), and they in turn must agree to whatever illegal restrictions Microsoft imposes or risk their very survival. Microsoft is aware of this power they have, and they use it. It must be removed. Microsoft must be required to release it's software at a constant price for any customer, OEM or individual, and they must be prevented from allowing any restrictions on the use or resale of that software beyond what is allowed by copyright law. Nothing less will suffice to prevent the continued illegal exploitation of their market position. Even this restriction is necessary but not sufficient; it should be added to the proposed settlement and should not replace it.
There is one thing that I feel must be added to Mr. Kegel's comments, hich in his essay was completely absent: even if the proposed settlement were completely free from loopholes, it would be insufficient. Microsoft repeatedly broke both U.S. law and court orders, and has profited to the extent of tens of billions of dollars and dozens of destroyed and crippled competitors in the process. If the only punishment they face is a set of restrictions designed to make the continuation of these acts harder, then they really have not been punished at all. The settlement against Microsoft must "deny to the defendant the fruits of its statutory violation", or it does not act as a disincentive to further violations at all.
The most direct way of enacting such a punishment is simply to fine Microsoft at a level commensurate with their criminal gains. Fortunately, Microsoft holds a cash (and cash equivalents) reserve of over thirty billion dollars, and so such a fine could be levied without requiring any business-disrupting liquidation on their part. Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated that they are motivated by money and not by the law; they will cease illegal behavior once it becomes financially unwise, and not a moment sooner.
---
Roy Stogner
You could have just pointed to the cartoon and let us see it unprepared, but I'm sure it will be twice as funny now that I've read the transcript!
That was a good start, but next time, try explaining the joke, too: "And so when the guy says Amazon.com turned a profit, it's so ridiculous that this super computer gets burned out, because that's how ridiculous Amazon turning a profit would be!" I know User Friendly cartoons are already a continuous laugh riot on their own, but if you'll follow this simple advice you can help make them even more hilarious!
Wall Street seems to be full of them: people buying stocks based on the "bigger sucker" theory, hoping that whether the stocks were worth anything or not there will be a bigger sucker to sell them to later. The whole dot-com crash was due to the failure of this theory: eventually you reach the biggest sucker.
However, there are still a few people out there who actually look at company earnings and (wait for it...) dividends before buying a stock. If you've got a few spare bucks you want to gamble with, being one of these "investors" may not sound like fun, but people playing with their retirement funds might want to give it a try.
Jabber is just like AIM and Gnutella and ICQ, there's just a backbone you have to get on.
No, there isn't. If I want to send you a Jabber message, the only computers involved are my Jabber server, your Jabber server, my computer, and your computer. No central server involved. Lots of people have jabber.com IM addresses, but only because there aren't enough ISPs running IM servers yet.
Your IM server should be just like your email server - it needs to be on a computer that won't go down, otherwise you miss messages. I don't think Jabber has anything like the DNS-integrated failover capabilities that email servers have, which is a problem, but not a huge one. I don't recall ever seeing a jabber.com server outage, just regular Jabber transport outages as AOL's blocking policies change.
The big thing is that, just like email and Gnutella, nobody has control over the backbone. AOL can, at any time, decide "I'm taking my ball and (going home/forcing you to watch 30 seconds of ads before logging on/closing down the service because MSN beat us/whatever), and tens of millions of IM users are forced to follow suit. With Jabber, just as with email, you can pick your provider (or start your own server on a static hostname like you suggested), and if someone else's provider pulls something stupid it doesn't affect you a bit.
I do think, in the strictest libertarian sense, that AOL has the right to say who gets to play on their servers and who doesn't. But in a practical sense, it's an attempt to seize a monopoly, it's stupid from an engineering perspective, it's stupid from a business perspective, and it's just way too reminiscent of the bad old days when everybody wasted resources developing their own proprietary WAN and none of them talked to each other. AOL managed to beat out Prodigy, Compuserve, etc. in part because they were quick to become part of the internet and move past that stage. It's not pretty to see them testing those waters again.
You do realise the difference. You pay for your net connection. You don't pay for your AIM connection. By agreeing (indirectly) to view ads, you are funding AIM.
I do realise the difference, which is why I supplimented this flawed analogy with the perfect analogy (to email services) which you deleted. I can send email to an AOL email user without using an approved client; why can't I do the same with an instant message? The answer is simply that AOL didn't capture enough of the email marketshare to attempt to entrap it; they did capture (or purchase via ICQ) enough of the instant messaging marketshare to do so.
Unless you come up with a better system than a proven centralized one, what can you do.
I can wait for someone else to come up with a better system than a proven centralized one. Jabber works the same way email works, with no "central post office". Backwards compatibility, if it wasn't thwarted by AOL, would then allow users who so desired to transition to this new system without losing their old contacts. In the end, AOL would only have to host AOL users on their own servers, and would retain the money-making aspects of their system (an incentive for more AOL subscribers) while dropping the money-losing aspects (What's the going rate on ad impressions today? Probably not enough to pay for the AIM server maintenance).
I'm an AOL stockholder; I don't want them throwing money away. But they're throwing it away, because they're too big to have been bitten hard enough by the dot-com lesson of how rarely selling services at a loss (or for ad money alone) makes sense. The only reason they're still running their system like this is because they believe they can keep their users a captive audience forever. It won't work that way: Microsoft is much better at the captive user game, and a few generations of Windows with "easy built in MSN instant messaging" will prove it.
You don't think you were modded by someone who actually read your post and thought about it, do you?
It's been a couple days; I'm curious as to how much attention is still being paid to this thread. Will I be taking the three point karma hit? Will jamie decide to rip 150 points away in one fell swoop? Anyway, consider this my vote cast for "we need front page discussion on why the moderation system is broken and how to fix it". This thread is offtopic because there's no better place to put it, not because it didn't need to be said.
If they opened up the "good protocol", you realise that people would block out ads and do whatver they want with it, on their largest platforms.
And God forbid they should be able to do that! Why, choosing to get an instant messaging account without having to watch AOL advertisements would be as bad as being able to get an ISP without seeing their ads regularly.
Oh, wait, we can do that.
PLUS (..plus mind you), you are using something that they provide for free.
No, I'm not. Their users are using something that they provide for free. I'm just sending those users messages, using a jabber server that AOL does not provide. Should I have to view an advertisement before I send email to an @aol.com address, too?
So before you critise them, think about what they are giving you, what you are paying for and what it costs to them.
"What it costs to them" is the direct result of them choosing a needlessly centralized messaging architecture (in order to make sure that their IM users remain trapped eyeballs), and that's not my problem. You'd think that after they'd successfully learned the "AOL users might want to send email to non-AOL users" lesson they might not make the same mistake twice.
Grip is just about as easy as it gets. It comes with Red Hat 7.2 now, preconfigured for ogg, preconfigured to query the freedb servers for tracks and titles. I'm still using it with lame, but when I move everything to ogg it makes that easy, too, with "Auto-rip on insert" and "Auto-eject when finished" boxes checked.
I can hear the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and the original CD (192kbps CBR or 160kbps VBR are good enough for me), however the difference isn't nearly so great as the difference between playing the music on $30 vs. $100 speakers. You can get decent computer speakers today (if you're not an audiophile and don't need very high volume) for as little as $60, but the prevalence of 128kbps recordings on the internet suggests to me that most of these people are still listening to music on the little white buzzers that came with their computer.
provides API (though not the nicer one) for writting your own client
Sure, if you want to write a crippled AIM clone to rope a larger set of users into AOL's IM network. If you want to actually create a compatible alternative to AOL's network, expect to be blocked at every turn.
Damned shortsighted fools. If the rest of the internet worked like this we'd still be dialing in to BBSes.
Their stocks steadily went down as has been the trend looking at their entire stock history.
Their stock peaked at 20 times it's IPO price, shockingly quickly. Obviously (to anyone not following the "bigger sucker" theory of investment) it was only headed back down from there when people came to their senses. I think if you take the split into account, they're actually trading ~10% above their IPO price again, which IMHO is a pretty fair valuation finally.
According to the FHS, /usr is supposed to be mountable as a shared (among computers of the same OS & architecture) read-only filesystem. Needless to say, putting per-computer configuration files in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 would make that impossible. However, making /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 a symlink (or leaving symlinks of individual files there like Red Hat does) solves backwards compatibility for programs that expect to see such a misdesigned configuration.
I have no idea where slackware's coming from. Once you're shuffling around configuration files, why not shuffle them into the directory (/etc) intended for their storage?
1) Where are the hardware specs? I've never done any driver programming, but I'd like to help.
2) Does it have dualhead support for the 8500 yet? I can wait months for 3D if it's coming eventually, but I'd very much like to hook up my second monitor tonight.
Higher pay == more applicants.
If you have 10 jobs to fill and 100 applicants, you get to be real picky about what kind of people you accept. 10 jobs and 11 applicants doesn't let you be so choosy.