Because they both spent way too much during the boom years; overcapacity is a symptom of that problem - many compaies paid billions to lay cable on the assumption the boom (and capacity requirements, and the willingness to chuck money at bandwidth) would continue forever.
There are only two solutions to the problem that will emerge from the market: either asset strippers will get involved, buy the capital assets at bargain basement prices and thereby start with a low cost model that can survive; or, the assets of failing companies will be consolidated into bigger and bigger companies which will simply (as happens in places like New Zealand) create artificial scarcity in order to justify their existing high cost models.
I used to do support for a newspaper publisher; it was truly disheartening to see the levels of English decline even while I was working there.
Most reporters are basically semi-literate, at best. Sub-editors usually have an excellent command of the language, and are the guys and gals who turn Reporterlish into English; sadly, most news companies view reporters, subs, and photographers as a waste of money, preferring to syndicate content from the wire services, have a bare minimum of staff to lay the paper out and write a few stories, and bulk up the advertising departments.
So yes, proofing is a lost art; researching and writing stories is becoming one; the boom is in advertising copy.
You can guesstimate trawling linux-kernel archives; the Google guys were having random lockup problems with early 2.2.x series kernels. Turned out they were in the IP stack. A kernel hacker asked for tcpdump logging and the Google guys explained they were getting (hundreds? thousands?) of connections per system per second.
The modern Western war on drugs began in the early 20th century with the banning of opium, cocaine, and dope (the latter of which was largely an exercise in the power of tabloid journalism).
It began earlier in China, but the Chinese government's efforts to keep opium out of the country failed when the Western nations used their armed forces to ensure the viability of the opium trade.
I reckon it's Bill. He's actually a bit of a liberal at heart (look at Slate and all the money he donates to UN health programs), and now he's horrified by what Microsoft has become. Having lost control of the company to the brutalapelike Steve Ballmer, he's looking for ways to subvert it.
Bill is trapped, a prisoner in his own machine. His best chance for freedom is to destroy it. Won't you help Bill? Won't somebody think of Bill?
Actually, both the development of railroads and cars have cause massive legal exceptions - perhaps this wasn't the case with the Federal roads (for example) in the States (although I doubt it), but wholesale forced confiscation of land for roading has been the norm in many Western countries. In fact, studying the history of rail in the US suggests a number of legal exceptions were made for the railroad companies in terms of how they wished to do business.
That said, I wouldn't be unhappy about winding back special laws for new technologies; we can start by invalidating business patents, patents on software, patents on natural phenomena generally, EULAs, grossly extended copyright provisions, acceptance of the notion that trademarks were meant to prevent criticism of companies, that technology companies should be exempt from normal labour law provisions like overtime and hiring immigrants, or that teh recording industry should be able to attack my property if they think I'm a crook. Getting fair use back would be nice, too.
Hey this ending legal exceptionism looks like good shit.
What's that? This is a complaint by vested interests who like these Draconian violations of existing norms and laws against citizens, not meant to cause us to reexamine the results of their special pleading? Oh, I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I didn't realise it was a device to enslave and shaft us harder.
So it's a different form of reward. Is the thrill of doing your patriotic duty and saving the world from Communism worth more or less than a million dollars? Depends on your perspective, but the Cambodians covered in napalm probably don't give a shit.
This is, of course, why LoTR is done with a mix of real and animated work - people were surprised when they heard that Jackson was getting lodges built for the halls of Rohan, and wanted to know why they didn't just CGI it. There seems to be a lack of understanding that for lots of material, models, sets, and so on produce vastly superior results, usually at a much lower cost.
Prosecutors and law enforcement are extremely reluctant to go after anything but the simplest cases of fraud (cheque scams, credit card theft, and so forth) because they are so complex and require a huge amount of specialised expertise; on top of that, fraud has a significant MEGO factor, and the defendants tend to be pillar of the community types, rather than easily convicted dirtballs.
For example, the reason the New York DA settled with Merrill Lynch in the case for their allegedly fraudulent promotion of dud stocks. Even though, to the public, it looks pretty open and shut (analysts leave document trail complaining that they're being forced to say good things about bad companies), the DAs office decided the difficulty of obtaining a conviction was such that it was better to let Merrill Lynch off with a trivial fine and no admission of guilt.
Yeah, that's why so many women get boob jobs. So they can look more like 8 year olds.
Go look around porn stores or sites; the bulk of them have women with big breasts and archetypally feminine hips.
Removal of body hair is a pretty old custom which appears to have little to do with being child-like; in ancient Egypt it was a status symbol, for example.
It may be popular in haute couture circles to hire models with a physical profile not dissimilar to pre-pubescent girls or boys, but that's got bugger all to do with sex appeal - you'll note the big name models who sell the most ogle-related merchandise - the Elle, Cindy, etc brigade - couldn't be mistaken for an overgrown 8 year old.
A 17 year old is hardly a "child", and most of the Western world outside the States has an age of consent of 16 8).
From a biological perspective, you aren't sexually mature until pubescence has its way with you. It might not be unnatural to find, say, a 14 year old attractive (if illegal and IMO improper to do anything about it), but you are seriously fucked up if you find an 8 year old interesting.
Yeah, that's right, you tell him. How dare he try and exercise his freedoms and rights as a citizen! People didn't die to defend his right to exercise constitutional rights!
I think they care a lot. About making sure that no-one can record, sell, or even give away music through in any way without their memebers getting involved. Why, competing companies and individual musicians might make money! And making money when you're not an RIAA member is the same as theft!
Re:modules, and why Rusty is wrong:
on
Kernel Summit Wrapup
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Broken binary compatability is considered by Linus to be a feature, not a bug. Essentially the kernel developers are unwilling to be constrained in their maniuplation of kernel internals by people who don't want to provide source.
The arguments around this have been hashed out time and time again on the l-k mailing list.
Unless you have hot-swap PCI, hot-swap SCSI, USB, Firewire, PCMCIA/Cardbus devices, CF, or any of the other devices that don't require reboots to change.
It works that way in DeadRat (kudzu). But that's a function of the userland, not the kernel.
modules, and why Rusty is wrong:
on
Kernel Summit Wrapup
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Rusty started with the claim that the only purpose for modules was adding hardware that you didn't have when you booted your kernel.
Sorry, but this shows a paucity of imagination ("Rusty's smoking crack again"). Modules are useful because I don't have to rebuild the kernel constantly. I love not needing to care if I have to swap ethernet cards - tune/etc/modules.conf, reboot. Not "reconfigure and recompile kernel, fiddle with lilo, reboot".
I also love the fact that distros no longer resemble the bad old days where there where a billion different boot images for installation, depending on which combination of hardware I happen to have. Anyone want to guess the QA costs to RedHat if modules went away?
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Because they both spent way too much during the boom years; overcapacity is a symptom of that problem - many compaies paid billions to lay cable on the assumption the boom (and capacity requirements, and the willingness to chuck money at bandwidth) would continue forever.
There are only two solutions to the problem that will emerge from the market: either asset strippers will get involved, buy the capital assets at bargain basement prices and thereby start with a low cost model that can survive; or, the assets of failing companies will be consolidated into bigger and bigger companies which will simply (as happens in places like New Zealand) create artificial scarcity in order to justify their existing high cost models.
I used to do support for a newspaper publisher; it was truly disheartening to see the levels of English decline even while I was working there.
Most reporters are basically semi-literate, at best. Sub-editors usually have an excellent command of the language, and are the guys and gals who turn Reporterlish into English; sadly, most news companies view reporters, subs, and photographers as a waste of money, preferring to syndicate content from the wire services, have a bare minimum of staff to lay the paper out and write a few stories, and bulk up the advertising departments.
So yes, proofing is a lost art; researching and writing stories is becoming one; the boom is in advertising copy.
You can guesstimate trawling linux-kernel archives; the Google guys were having random lockup problems with early 2.2.x series kernels. Turned out they were in the IP stack. A kernel hacker asked for tcpdump logging and the Google guys explained they were getting (hundreds? thousands?) of connections per system per second.
The modern Western war on drugs began in the early 20th century with the banning of opium, cocaine, and dope (the latter of which was largely an exercise in the power of tabloid journalism).
It began earlier in China, but the Chinese government's efforts to keep opium out of the country failed when the Western nations used their armed forces to ensure the viability of the opium trade.
I reckon it's Bill. He's actually a bit of a liberal at heart (look at Slate and all the money he donates to UN health programs), and now he's horrified by what Microsoft has become. Having lost control of the company to the brutal apelike Steve Ballmer, he's looking for ways to subvert it.
Bill is trapped, a prisoner in his own machine. His best chance for freedom is to destroy it. Won't you help Bill? Won't somebody think of Bill?
Actually, both the development of railroads and cars have cause massive legal exceptions - perhaps this wasn't the case with the Federal roads (for example) in the States (although I doubt it), but wholesale forced confiscation of land for roading has been the norm in many Western countries. In fact, studying the history of rail in the US suggests a number of legal exceptions were made for the railroad companies in terms of how they wished to do business.
That said, I wouldn't be unhappy about winding back special laws for new technologies; we can start by invalidating business patents, patents on software, patents on natural phenomena generally, EULAs, grossly extended copyright provisions, acceptance of the notion that trademarks were meant to prevent criticism of companies, that technology companies should be exempt from normal labour law provisions like overtime and hiring immigrants, or that teh recording industry should be able to attack my property if they think I'm a crook. Getting fair use back would be nice, too.
Hey this ending legal exceptionism looks like good shit.
What's that? This is a complaint by vested interests who like these Draconian violations of existing norms and laws against citizens, not meant to cause us to reexamine the results of their special pleading? Oh, I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I didn't realise it was a device to enslave and shaft us harder.
As opposed to Ford, who not only supported Hitler's war effort and availed himself of concertration camp labour, but sent Hitler birthday presents.
There's evil, and then there's evil...
So it's a different form of reward. Is the thrill of doing your patriotic duty and saving the world from Communism worth more or less than a million dollars? Depends on your perspective, but the Cambodians covered in napalm probably don't give a shit.
Actually, the Dutch play cricket. Just not terribly well, it has to be said.
And those ex-British Empire countries constitute something like 1.5 billion people. Which puts the small fan base for baseball in perspective 8).
I hate to enlighten you, but next to cricket, baseball is irrelevant as a world sport.
This is, of course, why LoTR is done with a mix of real and animated work - people were surprised when they heard that Jackson was getting lodges built for the halls of Rohan, and wanted to know why they didn't just CGI it. There seems to be a lack of understanding that for lots of material, models, sets, and so on produce vastly superior results, usually at a much lower cost.
Uh, no. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Prosecutors and law enforcement are extremely reluctant to go after anything but the simplest cases of fraud (cheque scams, credit card theft, and so forth) because they are so complex and require a huge amount of specialised expertise; on top of that, fraud has a significant MEGO factor, and the defendants tend to be pillar of the community types, rather than easily convicted dirtballs.
For example, the reason the New York DA settled with Merrill Lynch in the case for their allegedly fraudulent promotion of dud stocks. Even though, to the public, it looks pretty open and shut (analysts leave document trail complaining that they're being forced to say good things about bad companies), the DAs office decided the difficulty of obtaining a conviction was such that it was better to let Merrill Lynch off with a trivial fine and no admission of guilt.
Yeah, that's why so many women get boob jobs. So they can look more like 8 year olds.
Go look around porn stores or sites; the bulk of them have women with big breasts and archetypally feminine hips.
Removal of body hair is a pretty old custom which appears to have little to do with being child-like; in ancient Egypt it was a status symbol, for example.
It may be popular in haute couture circles to hire models with a physical profile not dissimilar to pre-pubescent girls or boys, but that's got bugger all to do with sex appeal - you'll note the big name models who sell the most ogle-related merchandise - the Elle, Cindy, etc brigade - couldn't be mistaken for an overgrown 8 year old.
A 17 year old is hardly a "child", and most of the Western world outside the States has an age of consent of 16 8).
From a biological perspective, you aren't sexually mature until pubescence has its way with you. It might not be unnatural to find, say, a 14 year old attractive (if illegal and IMO improper to do anything about it), but you are seriously fucked up if you find an 8 year old interesting.
Yeah, that's right, you tell him. How dare he try and exercise his freedoms and rights as a citizen! People didn't die to defend his right to exercise constitutional rights!
There are plenty of theists who don't believe in God. Ever heard of Shinto? For that matter, various Buddhist sects disagree about a supreme being.
And, as an atheist I do find it damn offensive when people try to get me to go along with their stupid delusions.
So sad, so true
Which rather substantiates Alan Cos's scepticism...
Actually, the main thing that stops child porn is that most people don't find children sexually interesting.
I think they care a lot. About making sure that no-one can record, sell, or even give away music through in any way without their memebers getting involved. Why, competing companies and individual musicians might make money! And making money when you're not an RIAA member is the same as theft!
Broken binary compatability is considered by Linus to be a feature, not a bug. Essentially the kernel developers are unwilling to be constrained in their maniuplation of kernel internals by people who don't want to provide source.
The arguments around this have been hashed out time and time again on the l-k mailing list.
Unless you have hot-swap PCI, hot-swap SCSI, USB, Firewire, PCMCIA/Cardbus devices, CF, or any of the other devices that don't require reboots to change.
It works that way in DeadRat (kudzu). But that's a function of the userland, not the kernel.
Sorry, but this shows a paucity of imagination ("Rusty's smoking crack again"). Modules are useful because I don't have to rebuild the kernel constantly. I love not needing to care if I have to swap ethernet cards - tune
I also love the fact that distros no longer resemble the bad old days where there where a billion different boot images for installation, depending on which combination of hardware I happen to have. Anyone want to guess the QA costs to RedHat if modules went away?
Rusty's wrong, wrong, wrong.
I didn't realise we had members of the Bush administration posting to /.; that line's getting a bit tired since you used it WRT Enron.