1 - Apache - still one of the most popular web servers out there. One of the most flexible and adaptable. It just rocks. 2 - Routed - the router daemon that, in some shape, form or fashion, runs probably 90% of the internet. Without routers to move the traffic, the rest of it just a moot point 3 - Netscape 1.0 - The idea of a GUI browser is fundamental to how we experience the web today. Without that, who needs dynamic objects like Flash since you wouldn't be able to see them. 4 - Flash - The idea that you could put moving pictures, sound, and video on a web page is a pretty fundamental one that gets largely over looked. 5 - Shockwave - The idea that could put games and other interactive media on a web page is another pretty fundamental idea that gets largely overlooked. 6 - CSS - Stylesheets - what a blessing to every web master everywhere. Praise the Lord and pass the wine.
I'm kinda surprised that more of my list didn't make it. Oh well......
Back in the day, you could have bought all this stuff at your local Radio Shack. Now, if you're lucky, they'll actually have an RJ-45 cable. Otherwise, they're a place of pre-packaged largely useless gizmos - radio controlled cars, over priced cell phones, and electronic doorbells. It's been a cold in hell since I've seen a transistor, resistor, servo, circuit board, etc. for sale in one. And this is really sad, because they were the only place around here that stocked that sort of thing. Because of this, it's been ages since I've been to a Radio Shack willingly.
I think it stifles innovation not to have places like that around. We went in there as kids and bought all kinds of stuff to build all kinds of stuff. I recall at one point we tried to attach a guidance system to our toy rockets. Now, this had immense practical ramifications since our ultimate purpose was to terrify Old Lady Mortinson's giant hound. Yes, I know, this wasn't horribly well thought out, but what I can say - we were nine. She had this huge beast that lounged about on her front porch until it spotted children. This thing's back was nearly as tall as we were. He had, in our opinion, the largest teeth ever seen on a dog, complete with world-class doggy breath and strings of drool. This wouldn't have been so bad except she lived across the street from the school.
We'd get out of school and have to wait for someone to pick us up. The hound would see all of us gathering and bestir himself. His first act was always to start baying. All this did was drive us to huddle together like a human bait ball. Well, the huge beast would gallop across the street and plow in to us. He'd have a lovely time chasing everyone around, tongue out, and huge paws throwing mud. We'd get in trouble for getting our school clothes dirty and we were convinced that the beast was out to eat one of us.
Anyway, we starting trying to come up with ways to defeat the beast. Since we knew we'd get in trouble for hurting it, that pretty much ruled out BB guns, pellet guns, and 22's that most of us already had (hey, we were country kids). That meant we had to be more creative. We'd go to the Radio Shack and spend hours pouring through the catalog and the shelves trying to come up with something to chase the beast off. We learned more about design from that ridiculous dog. Now, with no where to go, how are kids supposed to do that? Don't tell me that they can do it on line. It's not the same as holding the part in your hand to see how much it weighs or being able to really get a sense of it's size. These are abstract concepts that come hard to a nine year old kid.
The fact of the matter is that outsourcing everything to $4-$8 hr programmers is responsible for a lot of the problems that we're seeing. First off, the entire country of India isn't in IT. Most of the IT people who are any good are already here on an H1. Many of the Indian companies are now sending work to places like Uzbekistan because they don't have the local staff to do the work, or because it's cheaper there. So you've got some guys who contract the job for $8 and they sub it out for $4. And then you wonder why you get what you pay for?
The guys that had 20 years of experience and who made $35/hr are long gone into other fields, taking their knowledge and experience with them. The guys who knew not to use class whatever or function whatever because it had "issues". Since the brain drain happened so rapidly, none of that got transferred to the new guys.
Hosting the stuff isn't the same as linking to sites that do. Let's say I go to your blog and I know you have one. I post a comment with a link it in. That link points to the download of an MP3. Are you liable for the link? Am I? I have no real way to know that the song wasn't released by the artist. It's not like the videos where a notice pops up says, "Don't copy this or the FBI will come kick in your door." Furthermore, despite their protestations, the RIAA and MPAA could give a fart less about the musicians, artists, directors, actors, programmers, etc. They are widely renowned for cheating said groups of people out even the minuscule payments that they're due.
If you had any idea how the movie and record industries worked, you'd boycott them. I've refused for years to continue to fund the cartels that abuse, cheat, and then abandon the very artists that they're supposed to promote and protect. If I could send a check to Robert DeNiro or Trent Reznor directly, I'd gladly pay them for their work. When the MPAA and RIAA take something like 99.999% of all the sales of every CD and DVD, while the artists get that.001%, I don't feel the slightest shame in ripping off the MPAA and RIAA. Out of your $16.99 for a CD, the artists might, if he's lucky, see 1 or 2 cents. The cost for producing it is on the order of about 10 cents per disk. That leaves $16.78 as profit for the RIAA.
I hold out hope that more people will join me. That more artists will publish their MP3's so that I can pay them directly to download what I want - not what some record company exec thinks I should like. That more people will boycott them until we break the back of this beast that has terrorized those that it claims to serve. The only way to kill this hydra is to cut of it's food supply - money - and let it starve to death. The RIAA and MPAA are upset because they have become largely irrelevant. They no longer serve any useful function to anyone and its only a matter of time until they go the way of the dodo. Too stupid to adapt and too useless to live.
The survey data isn't really telling us anything we don't know already about linux users. Linux users are technophiles who still cannot accomplish everything without having to resort to a command line. This means that linux ain't ready for the Windoze using masses. Almost all of you are men, which makes me feel left out again. Many of the applications that linux is deployed in, even in the home, are still not the primary workstation type-uses - router, firewall, web server, print server. You download your disks and you still aren't using it at work all that much.
There may be more respondents, but the data is still the same.
I was never clear on what this was supposed to remedy. Many adults have a hard time managing overly fragile laptops. I can only imagine the headaches with a child or teenager who hasn't really learned to respect the delicate nature of things yet. I'm guessing that they were attempting to help with the digital divide. However, I find that to be ludicrous in light of the purchase of laptops.
It would seem to me to be more reasonable to pay for a $9.95 dial up connection to a local ISP for each family with children enrolled in school than it would be to spend $500-$1000 per child to supply them with a laptop. At a $1000 per family (not per child) that's about 8 1/2 years of Internet access. Furthermore, the average family with children has 2.3 children. This means that the same $9.95 a month would cover the other one or two children also in the home, thus lowering the overall cost.
Let the family purchase their own computer. The prices are down and many new computer models are available at local electronics shops here for $200-250 each. Furthermore, if the family has to pay for it, perhaps it will be treated with a bit more respect.
I'd say that I'm sorry that the kids are being punished, but I'm not. This isn't about the school district doing anything inappropriate. It's about kids doing something that they knew was inappropriate and being punished appropriately. I fail to see why anyone is upset by this. Part of the function of education is to teach children how to behave and what their boundaries are.
If they're told that these are rules, but you don't *really* have to obey them, what other rules will they choose to ignore? Will they ignore the rules about bringing weapons to school? Will they ignore the rules about bringing drugs to school? Will they chose to ignore the rules about cheating on tests?
I've seen people walked off jobs for less. If there's a proxy, it's there for a reason. If the rules say that you have to use the proxy or you can't see that site, surf it from home. I would much rather see them punished now, while the only thing they get dinged for is some time out of school, extra curricular activities, etc. instead of waiting until they're grown-ups with a car payment, a mortgage, some credit cards, and a couple of kids who get fired for doing the same thing at work.
The video game industry has suffered from this for ages. No matter how crappy or buggy the game, it would get good reviews from the rags and web sites. The reason for this is that the gaming companies would threaten to pull advance copies of their next game if any game got a bad review. Since not being to review games would effectively shut down the site/rag, they piped down and played along. It's been going on with the auto makers for decades. Seriously pan one of the new line up, and see what you get to write about next year. The beauty products industry has also long operated along these lines. Write something less than glowing about their new shade of lipstick and see if you ever get another sample. The fashion industry is another example.
Now that this has become the "norm", I'm not surprised to see it spreading to other parts of the computer industry. So much for having a free press - guess that they're not really "free" after all if all you have to do is buy a few ads.
That's right....mod me down because you don't agree with my original post. That doesn't change the fact that it's true. How can you people support this jackass? If it was your house he'd broken into, you'd be *pissed off* and would probably want "to fry" him too.
How about this scenario? I show up at your house while you're at work. You're locks aren't strong enough to keep me out. Your windows aren't bullet proof. Your walls aren't made out of titanium. Now, since I'm well equipped for this sort of thing - complete set of lock picks, bricks for smashing widows, and a saws all to just cut holes in the walls, I'll just break into your house, go poking around "because I'm curious" and "your security is lax". Now imagine for a moment you come home to find the mess that I've made of your domicile? Are you going to be happy? What about the time and expense it takes to clean all that up and repair your house?
I think his punishment should be working until he's paid back every penny of the expense of cleaning up his little intrusions. If it were in my hands, he'd be making restitution and not serving time in the traditional sense.
Actually, I suspect that this has far *more* to do with the money and far *less* to do with the technology. Commodity hardware is available to the home consumer for the first time ever. A quick jaunt out to some of the parts pricing web sites. RAM - PC2-8000 - 18 cents per MB. HDD - SATA II - 2 cents per MB of storage. Motherboards are cheap. Cases are cheap. However, if they start changing the system architecture they can talk all of us into buying new, high priced performance parts.
It is entirely fair. If I have to tweak a few things here an there to get it working, that's not a big deal. I did say "hack the source code in a major way". If I have to write whole libs, etc. in order to make it work because you deliberately left them out in order to keep anyone from being able to "do it themselves", you are not an open source project. I'm not looking for an open source project because I want to buy your application as an appliance or as a hosted service.
If you don't understand the Tivo analogy, then you never tried to download the Open Source TIVO project and get it work. There were big freaking giant chunks of the application that weren't included in the OSS version that were required in order to get it function. Now, please see my earlier comment. I'm not bashing them for keeping their proprietary code private. I'm bashing them for doing this while insisiting (at the time) that they were an open source project.
If your project deliberately excludes code necessary to make it work in order to get me to purchase something from your company, YOU ARE NOT OPEN SOURCE.
Here's the deal, people. There are only 10 of the so-called Tier 1 ISP. They are AOL, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, NTT, Qwest, SAVVIS, Sprint, and XO. You'll notice that many of these guys have absorbed many of other Tier 1 providers. For example Verizon now owns what used to be UUNET. They've also absorbed many of the Tier 2 ISP's. Quoting Wikipedia, "By definition, a Tier 1 network does not purchase IP transit from any other network to reach any other portion of the Internet." which is a definition I can live with.
What that means to you lay people is that whole freakin' globe is being carved up by 10 companies. Everyone else ultimately pays one of these 10 guys for bandwidth. How hard do you think it would be to get 10 CEO's to agree to charge Google for example, at the rate of 1 cent per click?
I'm not the kind of person to start screaming for the government to step in an start regulating things, but I would like to see the internet adjusted so that there are peering points that match the physical borders. I'd like to see the US goverment say that if you start charging content providers the peering points for the USA will be unavailable to you. If you're stateside, we'll charge with Anti Trust and RICO violations. Since American's buy more stuff on line than most anyone else, I think that this would prove an effective deterrent to this sort of stupidity out of the ISP's. They're already fat from the profits that they make off selling the rest of us bandwidth that must be used to send worms, viruses, and spam to each of us every day.
If they want to be more profitable, stop the worms, viruses, and spammers. That will leave plenty of bandwidth for the rest of us to do some thing amazing.
That I don't know. I know how we work our out. We keep a running annual (March 2, 2006 to March 2, 2007) count of drives that have failed. On any give day we take the # of failed drives divided by total number of drives deployed We haven't been tracking the usage hours on them, but I know for a fact that there is not one single machine in the labs that's older than May of 2004. We've seen it as high as one in four that have been deployed through out the building failing.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the doctrine of an agent. If you are paying someone, even if they're doing something they shouldn't be they are still representing your company, both from a customer service perspective and a legal perspective. I don't know how the law works where you are, but here....you are responsible for the actions of your employees while you're paying them. I really doubt that spammers go around testing my domain, which has nothing but an MX record for email addresses. There is no web page or anything else associated with it. If they did, it's an amazing coincidence that two days after I place my order with Best Buy that I start getting spam.
Had he sold out my SSN, Credit Card #, or some other bit of information, he would have likely committed a felony. As it is, he "just" sold out my email address. We're IT people. We handle and process data all the time. We are inherently in positions of trust. If you cannot be trusted, you should not be working. It's not a big leap to go from "just email address" to "just home addresses" to "just credit card #'s." I expect that a responsible and ethical company to have responsible and ethical employees. This person certainly didn't meet either of those criteria. The fact that they chose to keep him tells me that they lack a commitment to ethical behavior and enforcement of standards. You're comments here tell me the same about you.
Sure there is. Send all your patents to me for approval. If I like it, I'll approve it and if I don't....we'll you're screwed. Heck, I bet that I could get through them faster than the USPTO. I've got several myself so I know a bit about the process. My patents don't do a lot for me, since I don't "live or die" by them but I have, as you put it, bitch-slapped some people in court. Including some people who applied for a patent on *my device* and were granted a patent by the USPTO. How these nimrods can patent the same thing twice is beyond me. Now since I'm capable of building a database, I'm sure that I can come up with a way to search the patents I've already issued before granting a new one. Now since I've got my nifty database, I see no reason not to make people apply for them on line. Then we can publish the contents of the patent applications for anyone and everyone to read. I'd like to see a 5 star rating system and some amazon.com style user reviews.
We have several large computing labs in our building. We run mostly IDE or SATA drives depending age of the hardware in them. Now, in their defense, we've been undergoing constant construction which means huge power fluctuations all day long and a big surge at night when all the construction equipment is shut off. The labs on are not on UPS's because it just isn't feasable. In some of the labs during the past year, we've seen hard drive failure rates as high as 25%. Brand doesn't seem to matter, neither does size, RPM's, etc. Fortunately, these are lab machines and it's pretty easy to bring one back up. Take the spare hard drive, apply ghost image, install. Send dead hard drive back for warranty. Put new drive on shelf as spare. Rinse and repeat. Still, it's a lot of time to replace all those.
I have a domain that I bought on ebay for a dollar. It's misspelled but it's also extremely handy. Each time I have to go register on a web site some where, I register as (nameofwebsite)@mydomain.com. Then if I start getting spam, I know who sold me out. I bought something on-line from Best Buy's web site and so of course I register as bestbuy@mydomain.com. Lo and behold, I start getting a ton of spam addressed to bestbuy@mydomain.com. My first missive was polite, asking why they're sending me these emails. When I contact them about it, I'm told that it can't possibly be coming from them.
When I write them the second time, I'm still polite and explain that they must be sending them because that's the only place I've used this particular email address. They write back and insist quite rudely that I must have used this email address to register somewhere else. Furthermore, they're quite rude in insisting that they're not spamming me and asked me why I was so stupid as to think that they were. "Surely you realize that a reputable company like Best Buy wouldn't spam you."
My third missive wasn't polite at all. I rather pointedly asked them if they were mentally deficient or inbred, since they seemed to be too slow to pick up on the fact that they were corresponding with me at the email address of bestbuy@mydomain.com. And as I pointed out to them, I am not likely to be using this anywhere else. It has be used in one place and one place only and that is their web site. I also tell them that they don't get my email address back from people that they have so rudely, and in violation of their own privacy policy, ho'd it out to, that I'll be doing some spamming of my own. Groups like the State Attorney General's office, FCC, UseNet, anyone and everyone else I can think of that might be remotely interested.
Finally I got a letter back from Best Buy claiming that a security breach had "liberated my email address". I called the person that sent me the letter. He was rather nicer than the nimrods I'd been dealing with. When I asked if they had filed the proper disclosure, which is required in several states in which Best Buy operates, I got a long awkward pause and he finally admitted that one of their employees had been busted selling email addresses harvested by the web site. When I asked if they were at least terminating the miscreant, I was told that they were not. That was the last time I ever purchased anything in a Best Buy.
The RIAA and protecting intellectual property are almost oxymoronic. If the money collected was going to the artists, no one would really have much to say. However, it does not. It goes to "feed the beast" that is the RIAA.
Flip on your local radio station. Anything that gets played gets pre-approved by the RIAA. If you're an indie artist, you can kiss air time goodbye. You don't get any.
Most people still get exposed to new music and artists on the radio. That means you get zero publicity for your work while the lastest Brittany Spears song will be played until you're ready to gouge out your own ear drums with a cocktail fork.
Then, if by some miracle you do get signed, the record label-RIAA cartel fronts the money for the production of an album, foists off a producer on to the artist that will get the "right sound" based on what the record label executives think you & I like, and then bill the artists out the ass for "production costs" which have been know to include things like hookers for the label executives. Honestly, you'd be better off charging the production on your MasterCard since, with the fees and such the equivalent interest rate is about 41% APR, whereas your credit card has a maximum of 25% in most states. Keep in mind that it takes a minimum of 2 years to bring an album from concept to distribution. $100,000 at 41% = 141,000 (year1) 141,000 at 41% = 158,000 (year 2) 165,000 by year 3. That's just for a low budget CD. Now that money plus a bunch of fees comes out of anything that the artist might get.
Recording contracts have this clause in them called recoupment. What that means is that the artist doesn't get a dime until the record company gets all and I do mean all of it's investment back. Record contracts are usually 20-40 pages of legalese describing what the artist owes the record company and how the proceeds from any sale of anything from T-shirts to CD's are to be distributed. Typically, artists get less than $1.00 of the $16.95 you pay for a full price CD. If you buy the CD from a discount store (read Wal-Mart) or a club (e.g. BMG Music Club), it may only be a few pennies per CD.
Next, since you have an album you have to go on tour to promote it. Guess what, the label fronts the money again and takes it out of your hide later, along with interest. It works roughly the same way as your recording session. And yes, Virginia, recoupement comes into play again. If the tour doesn't make money, you don't get paid.
Now add that to the fact that they routinely cheat the artists out of the comparative pittance that they're due. Then consider that this entire industry would be completely and utterly non-existent without the artists, do you really think that they deal fairly with anyone? Sympathy for the RIAA? Hah, more like sympathy for the devil.
Well, if this goes anything like several of the other genetically modified plants, etc. forensic anthropology might be something practiced by the species that supersedes us. The "dyed in the pod" cotton has already been a huge disaster. The "modified" corn seems to be turning the normally placid corn borer beetle into something that's going to plague us until Satan hands out ice skates. Mother Nature exists in a delicate balance and we need to leave it alone until we know what we're doing. And we do *not* know what we're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! Microsoft is ripping off VMWare.... Guess Apple didn't have enough nifty ideas to keep their PHB's drooling...
2 cents,
Queen B.
1 - Apache - still one of the most popular web servers out there. One of the most flexible and adaptable. It just rocks.
2 - Routed - the router daemon that, in some shape, form or fashion, runs probably 90% of the internet. Without routers to move the traffic, the rest of it just a moot point
3 - Netscape 1.0 - The idea of a GUI browser is fundamental to how we experience the web today. Without that, who needs dynamic objects like Flash since you wouldn't be able to see them.
4 - Flash - The idea that you could put moving pictures, sound, and video on a web page is a pretty fundamental one that gets largely over looked.
5 - Shockwave - The idea that could put games and other interactive media on a web page is another pretty fundamental idea that gets largely overlooked.
6 - CSS - Stylesheets - what a blessing to every web master everywhere. Praise the Lord and pass the wine.
I'm kinda surprised that more of my list didn't make it. Oh well......
2 cents,
Queen B.
Back in the day, you could have bought all this stuff at your local Radio Shack. Now, if you're lucky, they'll actually have an RJ-45 cable. Otherwise, they're a place of pre-packaged largely useless gizmos - radio controlled cars, over priced cell phones, and electronic doorbells. It's been a cold in hell since I've seen a transistor, resistor, servo, circuit board, etc. for sale in one. And this is really sad, because they were the only place around here that stocked that sort of thing. Because of this, it's been ages since I've been to a Radio Shack willingly.
I think it stifles innovation not to have places like that around. We went in there as kids and bought all kinds of stuff to build all kinds of stuff. I recall at one point we tried to attach a guidance system to our toy rockets. Now, this had immense practical ramifications since our ultimate purpose was to terrify Old Lady Mortinson's giant hound. Yes, I know, this wasn't horribly well thought out, but what I can say - we were nine. She had this huge beast that lounged about on her front porch until it spotted children. This thing's back was nearly as tall as we were. He had, in our opinion, the largest teeth ever seen on a dog, complete with world-class doggy breath and strings of drool. This wouldn't have been so bad except she lived across the street from the school.
We'd get out of school and have to wait for someone to pick us up. The hound would see all of us gathering and bestir himself. His first act was always to start baying. All this did was drive us to huddle together like a human bait ball. Well, the huge beast would gallop across the street and plow in to us. He'd have a lovely time chasing everyone around, tongue out, and huge paws throwing mud. We'd get in trouble for getting our school clothes dirty and we were convinced that the beast was out to eat one of us.
Anyway, we starting trying to come up with ways to defeat the beast. Since we knew we'd get in trouble for hurting it, that pretty much ruled out BB guns, pellet guns, and 22's that most of us already had (hey, we were country kids). That meant we had to be more creative. We'd go to the Radio Shack and spend hours pouring through the catalog and the shelves trying to come up with something to chase the beast off. We learned more about design from that ridiculous dog. Now, with no where to go, how are kids supposed to do that? Don't tell me that they can do it on line. It's not the same as holding the part in your hand to see how much it weighs or being able to really get a sense of it's size. These are abstract concepts that come hard to a nine year old kid.
2 cents,
Queen B.
The fact of the matter is that outsourcing everything to $4-$8 hr programmers is responsible for a lot of the problems that we're seeing. First off, the entire country of India isn't in IT. Most of the IT people who are any good are already here on an H1. Many of the Indian companies are now sending work to places like Uzbekistan because they don't have the local staff to do the work, or because it's cheaper there. So you've got some guys who contract the job for $8 and they sub it out for $4. And then you wonder why you get what you pay for?
The guys that had 20 years of experience and who made $35/hr are long gone into other fields, taking their knowledge and experience with them. The guys who knew not to use class whatever or function whatever because it had "issues". Since the brain drain happened so rapidly, none of that got transferred to the new guys.
2 cents,
Queen B.
Oh and I suppose you thought that my "it's bigger but it's not new" comment meant you???
Hosting the stuff isn't the same as linking to sites that do. Let's say I go to your blog and I know you have one. I post a comment with a link it in. That link points to the download of an MP3. Are you liable for the link? Am I? I have no real way to know that the song wasn't released by the artist. It's not like the videos where a notice pops up says, "Don't copy this or the FBI will come kick in your door." Furthermore, despite their protestations, the RIAA and MPAA could give a fart less about the musicians, artists, directors, actors, programmers, etc. They are widely renowned for cheating said groups of people out even the minuscule payments that they're due.
.001%, I don't feel the slightest shame in ripping off the MPAA and RIAA. Out of your $16.99 for a CD, the artists might, if he's lucky, see 1 or 2 cents. The cost for producing it is on the order of about 10 cents per disk. That leaves $16.78 as profit for the RIAA.
If you had any idea how the movie and record industries worked, you'd boycott them. I've refused for years to continue to fund the cartels that abuse, cheat, and then abandon the very artists that they're supposed to promote and protect. If I could send a check to Robert DeNiro or Trent Reznor directly, I'd gladly pay them for their work. When the MPAA and RIAA take something like 99.999% of all the sales of every CD and DVD, while the artists get that
I hold out hope that more people will join me. That more artists will publish their MP3's so that I can pay them directly to download what I want - not what some record company exec thinks I should like. That more people will boycott them until we break the back of this beast that has terrorized those that it claims to serve. The only way to kill this hydra is to cut of it's food supply - money - and let it starve to death. The RIAA and MPAA are upset because they have become largely irrelevant. They no longer serve any useful function to anyone and its only a matter of time until they go the way of the dodo. Too stupid to adapt and too useless to live.
2 cents,
Queen B.
The survey data isn't really telling us anything we don't know already about linux users. Linux users are technophiles who still cannot accomplish everything without having to resort to a command line. This means that linux ain't ready for the Windoze using masses. Almost all of you are men, which makes me feel left out again. Many of the applications that linux is deployed in, even in the home, are still not the primary workstation type-uses - router, firewall, web server, print server. You download your disks and you still aren't using it at work all that much.
There may be more respondents, but the data is still the same.
2 cents,
Queen B.
I was never clear on what this was supposed to remedy. Many adults have a hard time managing overly fragile laptops. I can only imagine the headaches with a child or teenager who hasn't really learned to respect the delicate nature of things yet. I'm guessing that they were attempting to help with the digital divide. However, I find that to be ludicrous in light of the purchase of laptops.
It would seem to me to be more reasonable to pay for a $9.95 dial up connection to a local ISP for each family with children enrolled in school than it would be to spend $500-$1000 per child to supply them with a laptop. At a $1000 per family (not per child) that's about 8 1/2 years of Internet access. Furthermore, the average family with children has 2.3 children. This means that the same $9.95 a month would cover the other one or two children also in the home, thus lowering the overall cost.
Let the family purchase their own computer. The prices are down and many new computer models are available at local electronics shops here for $200-250 each. Furthermore, if the family has to pay for it, perhaps it will be treated with a bit more respect.
2 cents,
Queen B.
I'd say that I'm sorry that the kids are being punished, but I'm not. This isn't about the school district doing anything inappropriate. It's about kids doing something that they knew was inappropriate and being punished appropriately. I fail to see why anyone is upset by this. Part of the function of education is to teach children how to behave and what their boundaries are.
If they're told that these are rules, but you don't *really* have to obey them, what other rules will they choose to ignore? Will they ignore the rules about bringing weapons to school? Will they ignore the rules about bringing drugs to school? Will they chose to ignore the rules about cheating on tests?
I've seen people walked off jobs for less. If there's a proxy, it's there for a reason. If the rules say that you have to use the proxy or you can't see that site, surf it from home. I would much rather see them punished now, while the only thing they get dinged for is some time out of school, extra curricular activities, etc. instead of waiting until they're grown-ups with a car payment, a mortgage, some credit cards, and a couple of kids who get fired for doing the same thing at work.
2 cents,
Queen B.
Oh,yeah....go ahead and patent something that's been around for....oh.....twenty years or so.
2 cents,
Queen B.
The video game industry has suffered from this for ages. No matter how crappy or buggy the game, it would get good reviews from the rags and web sites. The reason for this is that the gaming companies would threaten to pull advance copies of their next game if any game got a bad review. Since not being to review games would effectively shut down the site/rag, they piped down and played along. It's been going on with the auto makers for decades. Seriously pan one of the new line up, and see what you get to write about next year. The beauty products industry has also long operated along these lines. Write something less than glowing about their new shade of lipstick and see if you ever get another sample. The fashion industry is another example.
Now that this has become the "norm", I'm not surprised to see it spreading to other parts of the computer industry. So much for having a free press - guess that they're not really "free" after all if all you have to do is buy a few ads.
2 cents,
Queen B.
That's right....mod me down because you don't agree with my original post. That doesn't change the fact that it's true. How can you people support this jackass? If it was your house he'd broken into, you'd be *pissed off* and would probably want "to fry" him too.
2 more cents,
QueenB
How about this scenario? I show up at your house while you're at work. You're locks aren't strong enough to keep me out. Your windows aren't bullet proof. Your walls aren't made out of titanium. Now, since I'm well equipped for this sort of thing - complete set of lock picks, bricks for smashing widows, and a saws all to just cut holes in the walls, I'll just break into your house, go poking around "because I'm curious" and "your security is lax". Now imagine for a moment you come home to find the mess that I've made of your domicile? Are you going to be happy? What about the time and expense it takes to clean all that up and repair your house?
I think his punishment should be working until he's paid back every penny of the expense of cleaning up his little intrusions. If it were in my hands, he'd be making restitution and not serving time in the traditional sense.
2 cents,
QueenB
Actually, I suspect that this has far *more* to do with the money and far *less* to do with the technology. Commodity hardware is available to the home consumer for the first time ever. A quick jaunt out to some of the parts pricing web sites. RAM - PC2-8000 - 18 cents per MB. HDD - SATA II - 2 cents per MB of storage. Motherboards are cheap. Cases are cheap. However, if they start changing the system architecture they can talk all of us into buying new, high priced performance parts.
2 cents,
QueenB
It is entirely fair. If I have to tweak a few things here an there to get it working, that's not a big deal. I did say "hack the source code in a major way". If I have to write whole libs, etc. in order to make it work because you deliberately left them out in order to keep anyone from being able to "do it themselves", you are not an open source project. I'm not looking for an open source project because I want to buy your application as an appliance or as a hosted service.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
If you don't understand the Tivo analogy, then you never tried to download the Open Source TIVO project and get it work. There were big freaking giant chunks of the application that weren't included in the OSS version that were required in order to get it function. Now, please see my earlier comment. I'm not bashing them for keeping their proprietary code private. I'm bashing them for doing this while insisiting (at the time) that they were an open source project.
If your project deliberately excludes code necessary to make it work in order to get me to purchase something from your company, YOU ARE NOT OPEN SOURCE.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
Here's the deal, people. There are only 10 of the so-called Tier 1 ISP. They are AOL, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, NTT, Qwest, SAVVIS, Sprint, and XO. You'll notice that many of these guys have absorbed many of other Tier 1 providers. For example Verizon now owns what used to be UUNET. They've also absorbed many of the Tier 2 ISP's. Quoting Wikipedia, "By definition, a Tier 1 network does not purchase IP transit from any other network to reach any other portion of the Internet." which is a definition I can live with.
What that means to you lay people is that whole freakin' globe is being carved up by 10 companies. Everyone else ultimately pays one of these 10 guys for bandwidth. How hard do you think it would be to get 10 CEO's to agree to charge Google for example, at the rate of 1 cent per click?
I'm not the kind of person to start screaming for the government to step in an start regulating things, but I would like to see the internet adjusted so that there are peering points that match the physical borders. I'd like to see the US goverment say that if you start charging content providers the peering points for the USA will be unavailable to you. If you're stateside, we'll charge with Anti Trust and RICO violations. Since American's buy more stuff on line than most anyone else, I think that this would prove an effective deterrent to this sort of stupidity out of the ISP's. They're already fat from the profits that they make off selling the rest of us bandwidth that must be used to send worms, viruses, and spam to each of us every day.
If they want to be more profitable, stop the worms, viruses, and spammers. That will leave plenty of bandwidth for the rest of us to do some thing amazing.
2 cents,
QueenB.
That I don't know. I know how we work our out. We keep a running annual (March 2, 2006 to March 2, 2007) count of drives that have failed. On any give day we take the # of failed drives divided by total number of drives deployed We haven't been tracking the usage hours on them, but I know for a fact that there is not one single machine in the labs that's older than May of 2004. We've seen it as high as one in four that have been deployed through out the building failing.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the doctrine of an agent. If you are paying someone, even if they're doing something they shouldn't be they are still representing your company, both from a customer service perspective and a legal perspective. I don't know how the law works where you are, but here....you are responsible for the actions of your employees while you're paying them. I really doubt that spammers go around testing my domain, which has nothing but an MX record for email addresses. There is no web page or anything else associated with it. If they did, it's an amazing coincidence that two days after I place my order with Best Buy that I start getting spam.
Had he sold out my SSN, Credit Card #, or some other bit of information, he would have likely committed a felony. As it is, he "just" sold out my email address. We're IT people. We handle and process data all the time. We are inherently in positions of trust. If you cannot be trusted, you should not be working. It's not a big leap to go from "just email address" to "just home addresses" to "just credit card #'s." I expect that a responsible and ethical company to have responsible and ethical employees. This person certainly didn't meet either of those criteria. The fact that they chose to keep him tells me that they lack a commitment to ethical behavior and enforcement of standards. You're comments here tell me the same about you.
2 cents,
QueenB.
Sure there is. Send all your patents to me for approval. If I like it, I'll approve it and if I don't....we'll you're screwed. Heck, I bet that I could get through them faster than the USPTO. I've got several myself so I know a bit about the process. My patents don't do a lot for me, since I don't "live or die" by them but I have, as you put it, bitch-slapped some people in court. Including some people who applied for a patent on *my device* and were granted a patent by the USPTO. How these nimrods can patent the same thing twice is beyond me. Now since I'm capable of building a database, I'm sure that I can come up with a way to search the patents I've already issued before granting a new one. Now since I've got my nifty database, I see no reason not to make people apply for them on line. Then we can publish the contents of the patent applications for anyone and everyone to read. I'd like to see a 5 star rating system and some amazon.com style user reviews.
2 cents,
QueenB.
We have several large computing labs in our building. We run mostly IDE or SATA drives depending age of the hardware in them. Now, in their defense, we've been undergoing constant construction which means huge power fluctuations all day long and a big surge at night when all the construction equipment is shut off. The labs on are not on UPS's because it just isn't feasable. In some of the labs during the past year, we've seen hard drive failure rates as high as 25%. Brand doesn't seem to matter, neither does size, RPM's, etc. Fortunately, these are lab machines and it's pretty easy to bring one back up. Take the spare hard drive, apply ghost image, install. Send dead hard drive back for warranty. Put new drive on shelf as spare. Rinse and repeat. Still, it's a lot of time to replace all those.
2 cents.
QueenB.
I have a domain that I bought on ebay for a dollar. It's misspelled but it's also extremely handy. Each time I have to go register on a web site some where, I register as (nameofwebsite)@mydomain.com. Then if I start getting spam, I know who sold me out. I bought something on-line from Best Buy's web site and so of course I register as bestbuy@mydomain.com. Lo and behold, I start getting a ton of spam addressed to bestbuy@mydomain.com. My first missive was polite, asking why they're sending me these emails. When I contact them about it, I'm told that it can't possibly be coming from them.
When I write them the second time, I'm still polite and explain that they must be sending them because that's the only place I've used this particular email address. They write back and insist quite rudely that I must have used this email address to register somewhere else. Furthermore, they're quite rude in insisting that they're not spamming me and asked me why I was so stupid as to think that they were. "Surely you realize that a reputable company like Best Buy wouldn't spam you."
My third missive wasn't polite at all. I rather pointedly asked them if they were mentally deficient or inbred, since they seemed to be too slow to pick up on the fact that they were corresponding with me at the email address of bestbuy@mydomain.com. And as I pointed out to them, I am not likely to be using this anywhere else. It has be used in one place and one place only and that is their web site. I also tell them that they don't get my email address back from people that they have so rudely, and in violation of their own privacy policy, ho'd it out to, that I'll be doing some spamming of my own. Groups like the State Attorney General's office, FCC, UseNet, anyone and everyone else I can think of that might be remotely interested.
Finally I got a letter back from Best Buy claiming that a security breach had "liberated my email address". I called the person that sent me the letter. He was rather nicer than the nimrods I'd been dealing with. When I asked if they had filed the proper disclosure, which is required in several states in which Best Buy operates, I got a long awkward pause and he finally admitted that one of their employees had been busted selling email addresses harvested by the web site. When I asked if they were at least terminating the miscreant, I was told that they were not. That was the last time I ever purchased anything in a Best Buy.
2 cents,
QueenB.
The RIAA and protecting intellectual property are almost oxymoronic. If the money collected was going to the artists, no one would really have much to say. However, it does not. It goes to "feed the beast" that is the RIAA.
Flip on your local radio station. Anything that gets played gets pre-approved by the RIAA. If you're an indie artist, you can kiss air time goodbye. You don't get any.
Most people still get exposed to new music and artists on the radio. That means you get zero publicity for your work while the lastest Brittany Spears song will be played until you're ready to gouge out your own ear drums with a cocktail fork.
Then, if by some miracle you do get signed, the record label-RIAA cartel fronts the money for the production of an album, foists off a producer on to the artist that will get the "right sound" based on what the record label executives think you & I like, and then bill the artists out the ass for "production costs" which have been know to include things like hookers for the label executives. Honestly, you'd be better off charging the production on your MasterCard since, with the fees and such the equivalent interest rate is about 41% APR, whereas your credit card has a maximum of 25% in most states. Keep in mind that it takes a minimum of 2 years to bring an album from concept to distribution. $100,000 at 41% = 141,000 (year1) 141,000 at 41% = 158,000 (year 2) 165,000 by year 3. That's just for a low budget CD. Now that money plus a bunch of fees comes out of anything that the artist might get.
Recording contracts have this clause in them called recoupment. What that means is that the artist doesn't get a dime until the record company gets all and I do mean all of it's investment back. Record contracts are usually 20-40 pages of legalese describing what the artist owes the record company and how the proceeds from any sale of anything from T-shirts to CD's are to be distributed. Typically, artists get less than $1.00 of the $16.95 you pay for a full price CD. If you buy the CD from a discount store (read Wal-Mart) or a club (e.g. BMG Music Club), it may only be a few pennies per CD.
Next, since you have an album you have to go on tour to promote it. Guess what, the label fronts the money again and takes it out of your hide later, along with interest. It works roughly the same way as your recording session. And yes, Virginia, recoupement comes into play again. If the tour doesn't make money, you don't get paid.
Now add that to the fact that they routinely cheat the artists out of the comparative pittance that they're due. Then consider that this entire industry would be completely and utterly non-existent without the artists, do you really think that they deal fairly with anyone? Sympathy for the RIAA? Hah, more like sympathy for the devil.
2 cents,
QueenB.
And your post quite proves my point. Math is about more than learning to do math. It's about learning logic and reasoning, among other things.
2 cents,
QueenB.
Well, if this goes anything like several of the other genetically modified plants, etc. forensic anthropology might be something practiced by the species that supersedes us. The "dyed in the pod" cotton has already been a huge disaster. The "modified" corn seems to be turning the normally placid corn borer beetle into something that's going to plague us until Satan hands out ice skates. Mother Nature exists in a delicate balance and we need to leave it alone until we know what we're doing. And we do *not* know what we're doing.
2 cents,
QueenB.