You're right. Apple is really only competition for RH on the desktop. I just think it's interesting that the RH seems to be giving up on that market, when Apple seems to be making some real progress with UNIX on the desktop.
Yes, Apple isn't competition for the serious server market. Yes, money is to be made by getting people off HP or Solaris. But why should Red Hat be making that money rather than other companies? HP may cannibalize their own market by bundling Linux and services with their hardware. IBM is far more capitalized than RH's "top public software company in North Carolina". What does Red Hat really provide that is compelling enough to win in that market? I'm not sure I see what Red Hat will do that will let them win there.
They seem to be going in many directions at once. Maybe that will give them a chance to do everything well, or maybe not. Will companies that focus on one area do better? Despite some lackluster experiences with RH, I don't really want to run Red Hat down. They've done a lot for Linux. But, they can't deliver on the desktop. Will they be able to deliver top solutions/service on both embedded and server at the same time?
A: I think it's a build-up to meet the opportunity in the UNIX-to-Linux migration and embedded systems. Those are the two priorities.
Building up to meet the UNIX-to-Linux migration or the migration to UNIX that is OS X? RH basically conceded the desktop in the face of M$ monopoly. Embedded is certainly the place for growth. But aside from that, is Apple the real competition?
OS X is one of the widest installed distribution of UNIX, has an elegant desktop solution, and has the potential to be an elegant server solution for many purposes. Rumors of the possibility of OS X for other hardware also stir the pot.
Don't get me wrong. I really appreciate what Linux has done for me personally. As a (past) RH customer, I can't say the same for that particular company. What direction is RH really going to go, and can they do it successfully?
www.tuxia.com has a thin-client solution. Linux embedded OS, native X Windows support, Citrix Metaframe optional.
I've seen these guys at LinuxWorld Tokyo and some other shows. They have some snazzy looking devices that will fit any "designer office". Unfortunately, last time I talked to them, they were turning more to set-top box development.
It seems that IBM is making a pretty good go of moving towards open source. They are using OSS to add value to their hardware and then selling services to support it. They have demonstrated that OSS can be a valuable part of a hardware and services business.
OSS does free up customers. They aren't locked into a proprietary vendor. However, it doesn't have to lead customers away. Companies have to compete directly on the value of their hardware and services. If SUN can make the case that their hardware is superior and services give good value, then OSS may benefit them.
It doesn't cost the developer anything to put a Linux OS on a PDA. (Basically) true, but can anyone who is in the know give a rough idea of the cost factor? I'm just curious how much Palm and M$ charge to license their OS's. If a Linux based PDA is a solely financial decision, the savings will have to be pretty substantial.
They have to offset other higher costs of marketing/advertising a new brand to fight two or three really well entrenched competitors. Smaller mfrs also pay more for components and assembly.
Is the Linux PDA mostly a financial choice, or a quality choice for the various companies? In Sharp's case, it seems to be tech/quality; they already own a very successful PDA OS and brand.
Whatever the reason, I still want one. And I'd kill for one in a half VGA clam-shell with a good keyboard like my Hitachi! (Damn WinCe)
I'm running MacOS/YDL dual boot on an iMac that I fished out of the trash. Install was painless. Runs nicely.
I would also check out SuSe for PPC. I've recently installed SuSe 7.3 on my Vaio laptop and really like it much better than RH. If you purchase the SuSe distro, you get some pretty good docs/manuals that your boss might find handy. I think these are better than what I've seen so far from YDL. Providing him with some resources may mean that you'll have less support/hand-holding to do.
And when you're done printing it on the cheap, you get a book on crap paper with poor print quality and an old 3-ring binder. Or will you pay Kinko's to bind this for you?
My time and my eyesight are worth a few bucks to me.
Go ahead and waste your time printing and futzing. I'll spend it reading and learning something (or just waste it on/. he-he!)
Transbay Wireless in Berkeley is offering some wicked fast fixed wireless in the East Bay. Unfortunatey, their site doesn't have the pricing info up. However, the access prices they do list on their main site seem very reasonable. As a plus, they are a very Unix/Linux friendly shop. Can anybody comment on their experience with Transbay's service? I may be moving to their wireless service area, and would love to ditch the cable co.
I think an important market for satellite radio will be immigrants to the US. just as an example, is there a good Chinese, Russian, Hindi, or Portuguese language broadcast station in your area? Probably not. Are there a lot of people in the US who speak these languages as their mother tongue? Sure. I bet plenty of these people would appreciate being able to pick up syndicated news/talk/music from home.
Just capturing part of that market will set set satellite radio well on its way to the customer volume it needs for viability. These may seem like niche markets, but the cost to provide services like these should be low. The volume will make the receivers cheap, then the market will grow.
Yes, there is something; ads. Wait! Ads online are incredibly intrusive and annoying. In mag format, they just flip on by without taking up screen space.
True, many of the ads are irrelevant, but some are informative. You may actually find out about a company/product of interest to you. Even if you aren't shopping, perusing the ads does may give you some new perspective on where Linux is going (or where co's want to take it for you).
A small benefit? Yes. Useful to *some* people? Definitely. Useful to you? I dunno...
Looked at the headline and thought "Hmmm, I haven't gotten that much more spam...". Spam seems to be a bit of a misnomer here. Sure, there is some increase in holiday advertising and such, but spam (i.e. unsolicited e-mail) isn't what they are really complaining about here.
In the body of the article, they describe how jokes, animations, and greeting cards are clogging the system. Well, duh! Ask the USPS. They get clogged with lots of this stuff at this time of year; they're called Christmas cards.
This isn't really spam per se. It generally comes from people you know, even if you only hear from them once a year. Somehow the mailman and my mailbox cope with the onslaught every year. If your corporate infrastructure can't handle it, well what will you do if there is a legitimate boost in business traffic?
I guess these people will just crack the whip on corporate use policies again. Fat lot of good that seems to do.
All this trumpeting about %650 increased spam is an alarmist waste. (Not that I really want any more of the tons of weight-loss pills; credit fixing programs; appeals from Nigerian humanitarian organizations looking for my bank account number, promising free money for my help.)
Definitely run what you like now, but run plenty of conduit with pull strings for later. PVC is probably fine, but metal conduit can be had cheap/free too from salvage. The EMI shielding is a nice plus. Just make sure you that you keep an eye out for any grounding issues. And if you think you have enough conduit, run more just in case. It'll make your life easier to avoid congested conduit in the future. It can never hurt to leave yourself some leeway.
This is just what I need. I think Werie can really make a go of it. Now is a good opportunity for them.
1. ATT just gave everyone one more reason to hate them. Nobody like the cable companies. Would I trade speed for convenience? Yes, at the speeds they have.
2. DSL still isn't an option for me. I live on the peninsula south of SF, but distance and really bad line noise make DSL impractical.
3. Cost saving. By renogiating pole-costs for free service to cities, Aerie will save money; guarantee modem maunfacturers/distributors a steady market; and build mindshare.
4. Changed the image. City employees who like it (assuming the service is as good as it was) will be walking ads. They may get their own service off the clock. Also, their friends/neighbors may be convinced this is a good thing. Nothing like seeing a new option in operation to show people that it really works and they are not taking a risk. This is important to reach a broad popular base. It would also help to shake the stupid Austin Powers-esque / Mobile spy image in Metricom's old ads. Do you really need to surf the web as your sports car cruises the tarmac to your jet?
Essentially, the service worked like a convenient fixed-wireless network for my friends. Boot up the laptop at home, at work, or over at someone else's house- not on the tilt-a-whirl.
Aerie should sell this as a non-intrusive way to get always on service for people who hate the telco/cable co. Sell it as a way to get net access at work without monitoring by your employer. Sell it to cities/governments/utilities as a redundant network for when the phone/cable service tanks. If I recall, the network was brought up in Manhattan to help with rescue efforts.
5. I hope they make a go fo it. I need the service and will pay those rates for it.
OTOH, when I want money I ask for it, and if I don't get it I go elsewhere if the market lets me.
"If the market lets me" is a key part of why teachers need good union representation. Ever try to look for a decent teaching job mid-school year? I can tell you it ain't no fun. There is far less fluidity in the education market than in engineering. What if you only had one window of opportunity to change jobs in any calendar year? That cube would start to feel even more confining than it already does.
Also, you may not be able to move as easily as people in other professions. The market is limited by government regulation. Certification rules vary. Do you need a different license to be a geek in a different state? I didn't think so.
I use a Hitachi Persona and my wife can't live without her Sigmarion. These are little half laptop size WinCE based PDA/palmtops. Clam shell design with up to half VGA display, full(enough) size keyboard, plenty of ram for your purposes, PCMCIA support, built in modem, and great touch screens.
I don't know if there is the kind of equation editor you are looking for, but it is very easy to mix keyboard input and touch-screen-scrawled bitmaps in a single doc.
NEC sells some outside Japan, and they are great. The trouble is price. I picked mine up second hand in Osaka for about 200 USD. Great value if you can cope with the Japanese OS. The lack of market volume in the west means that deals like this are hard to find. You can find some NEC 780 or 790 models on eBay and such.
For me the form factor beats iPaq etc hands down. Plenty of screen real estate, but easy to carry. Not pocket-size, but most PDA's wind up in backpacks, cases, etc anyhow. A real keyboard makes any kind of writing easy.
If you are so inclined and have the time, you can get Linux to run on some of them, too.
Actually, it is whatever level of service is stated in the contract/service agreement with the customer. Regardless of the economic or technical realities the company faces, they are bound by the commitement that they make when they sell the service.
Actually, it is whatever level of service is stated in the little slip of paper coated with legalese slipped in the back of your bill from time to time stating that their policies have changed. How many of these little updates, revision of service announcements, clarifications, or whatever they call them have you received from the phone/cable/isp/credit card company and just plain ignored because they are generally impenetrable and not worth your time?
Lawyers gat paid big bucks to create this kind of ambiguity. You can just suck it up, terminate the service, or figure out another work-around;)
as far as he goes. Yes, corporate interests will sell out ideals for cash. Is this news?
Yes, the Net is being throttled in some places. This is simply an instance of the far more pervasive and damaging censorship that has always gone on. (Compare newspaper-reader-years to net-surfer-years in China.)
But, to Katz' argument, are corporations under some obligation to export US rhetoric re: free speech? I don't think so. Do corporations do anything within reason to make a buck? Sure.
Let's look at how they will make a buck next. I like to see politics here, but/. is for tech issues, too. OK, Net access is blocked outside of Riyadh with US corporate help. The way I see it, that creates a market hungry for porn, South Park, Salman Rushdie novels, and Britney.
Here is the incentive for other companies to throw up another satellite and bypass the chokepoints. I understand that two-way (no phone line req'd satellite-based net service is just over the horizon.)Illicit sat dishes have been a feature of Iran rooftops for years.
That is just the first idea off the top of my head. The point is that companies are motivated by cash. Governments are motivated by a whole lot of things, including paranoia. One corp will sell blocking software, another will sell tools to get around it somehow. Sell to both sides.
Does this solve the problems with governments everywhere poking around where they don't belong? No, but it is a start. Remember the power of technology to subvert governments has a long track record.
On a final note, more insidious is the bastardization and dumbing down of culture. Katz mentioned Harry Potter. What the hell is a Sorceror's Stone? Last time I checked it was a Philosopher's Stone. Why must the US public continue to put up with corporations blocking access to the real goods to line their pockets...?
I know this will piss some (many) people off, but I often find these domain name spats touchingly irrelevant.
In the long term, will domain name shortage be a real and continuing problem?
Just putting...sucks... on a domain doesn't offer much in the way of real criticism. Effective activism isn't as easy as calling people names. If it's just a prank, then isn't all the hoopla a bit overblown?
Corporate dominance of public discourse is not a new problem. All the free access to domain names in the world will not overcome the fact that most of what most people see/read/hear is controlled by a relatively small group of greedy people. The world is poorer for it, but this is old news.
Try reading some pulped tree products for a great discussion of these problems. I'd start with Ben Bagdikian's classic, The Media Monopoly-- http://www.commoncouragepress.com/bagdikian_monopo ly.html
You'll find some more pressing media control issues than "...sucks.com".
...the management doesn't seem to add any accountability. Until management cares enough to track where and when the damage occurs, and uses that information...
...In the proper shipping container, probably via UPS.
I've shipped all kinds of computers, monitors, and other peripherals (even ceramics, large mirrors, bottles of wine, and antiques) domestically and internationally by package services, container freight, as checked airline luggage, by truck, and just plain old mail. Plenty of damage to the boxes, but no damage to the contents *ever*.
They may take up space, but the original shipping cartons are designed to take the punishment. If you don't want to, or can't keep yours, get one that some new purchaser has just gotten rid of. If you can't do that, pack properly.
Use bubble wrap, lots of it. Get styrofoam from the trash somewhere. Nest packed cartons inside of cartons. Pack the cartons full. If the contents are even slightly loose (as these seem to have been) then "Contents may settle during shipping." Look in you next box of Triscuits and checkout the dust at the bottom.
Insure everything that is of any value to you.
If the contents are valuable, isn't it worth an evening of your time to do it right?
It's not UPS vs FEDEX vs whatever. They all hire cheap labor to do something as quickly and cheaply as they can. They all suck at babysitting your plastic knick-knacks. Shipping companies do not care about your personal possessions. You do. Take some responsibility.
Or now that you're in America you can sue. Good Luck!
Slashdot Mirror
All those poor gov't worker cast out of windows...
Makes you actually want defenestration.
(chuckle)
You're right. Apple is really only competition for RH on the desktop. I just think it's interesting that the RH seems to be giving up on that market, when Apple seems to be making some real progress with UNIX on the desktop.
Yes, Apple isn't competition for the serious server market. Yes, money is to be made by getting people off HP or Solaris. But why should Red Hat be making that money rather than other companies? HP may cannibalize their own market by bundling Linux and services with their hardware. IBM is far more capitalized than RH's "top public software company in North Carolina". What does Red Hat really provide that is compelling enough to win in that market? I'm not sure I see what Red Hat will do that will let them win there.
They seem to be going in many directions at once. Maybe that will give them a chance to do everything well, or maybe not. Will companies that focus on one area do better? Despite some lackluster experiences with RH, I don't really want to run Red Hat down. They've done a lot for Linux. But, they can't deliver on the desktop. Will they be able to deliver top solutions/service on both embedded and server at the same time?
Q: What are Red Hat's investment priorities?
A: I think it's a build-up to meet the opportunity in the UNIX-to-Linux migration and embedded systems. Those are the two priorities.
Building up to meet the UNIX-to-Linux migration or the migration to UNIX that is OS X? RH basically conceded the desktop in the face of M$ monopoly. Embedded is certainly the place for growth. But aside from that, is Apple the real competition?
OS X is one of the widest installed distribution of UNIX, has an elegant desktop solution, and has the potential to be an elegant server solution for many purposes. Rumors of the possibility of OS X for other hardware also stir the pot.
Don't get me wrong. I really appreciate what Linux has done for me personally. As a (past) RH customer, I can't say the same for that particular company. What direction is RH really going to go, and can they do it successfully?
Embedded; Maybe.
Desktop: No.
Servers, Telcos: Maybe.
The right link.
www.tuxia.com has a thin-client solution. Linux embedded OS, native X Windows support, Citrix Metaframe optional.
I've seen these guys at LinuxWorld Tokyo and some other shows. They have some snazzy looking devices that will fit any "designer office". Unfortunately, last time I talked to them, they were turning more to set-top box development.
Can't hurt to take a look.
It seems that IBM is making a pretty good go of moving towards open source. They are using OSS to add value to their hardware and then selling services to support it. They have demonstrated that OSS can be a valuable part of a hardware and services business.
OSS does free up customers. They aren't locked into a proprietary vendor. However, it doesn't have to lead customers away. Companies have to compete directly on the value of their hardware and services. If SUN can make the case that their hardware is superior and services give good value, then OSS may benefit them.
It doesn't cost the developer anything to put a Linux OS on a PDA. (Basically) true, but can anyone who is in the know give a rough idea of the cost factor? I'm just curious how much Palm and M$ charge to license their OS's. If a Linux based PDA is a solely financial decision, the savings will have to be pretty substantial.
They have to offset other higher costs of marketing/advertising a new brand to fight two or three really well entrenched competitors. Smaller mfrs also pay more for components and assembly.
Is the Linux PDA mostly a financial choice, or a quality choice for the various companies? In Sharp's case, it seems to be tech/quality; they already own a very successful PDA OS and brand.
Whatever the reason, I still want one. And I'd kill for one in a half VGA clam-shell with a good keyboard like my Hitachi! (Damn WinCe)
I'm running MacOS/YDL dual boot on an iMac that I fished out of the trash. Install was painless. Runs nicely.
I would also check out SuSe for PPC. I've recently installed SuSe 7.3 on my Vaio laptop and really like it much better than RH. If you purchase the SuSe distro, you get some pretty good docs/manuals that your boss might find handy. I think these are better than what I've seen so far from YDL. Providing him with some resources may mean that you'll have less support/hand-holding to do.
Puh-leeze!
/. he-he!)
And when you're done printing it on the cheap, you get a book on crap paper with poor print quality and an old 3-ring binder. Or will you pay Kinko's to bind this for you?
My time and my eyesight are worth a few bucks to me.
Go ahead and waste your time printing and futzing. I'll spend it reading and learning something (or just waste it on
Transbay Wireless in Berkeley is offering some wicked fast fixed wireless in the East Bay. Unfortunatey, their site doesn't have the pricing info up. However, the access prices they do list on their main site seem very reasonable. As a plus, they are a very Unix/Linux friendly shop. Can anybody comment on their experience with Transbay's service? I may be moving to their wireless service area, and would love to ditch the cable co.
I think an important market for satellite radio will be immigrants to the US. just as an example, is there a good Chinese, Russian, Hindi, or Portuguese language broadcast station in your area? Probably not. Are there a lot of people in the US who speak these languages as their mother tongue? Sure. I bet plenty of these people would appreciate being able to pick up syndicated news/talk/music from home.
Just capturing part of that market will set set satellite radio well on its way to the customer volume it needs for viability. These may seem like niche markets, but the cost to provide services like these should be low. The volume will make the receivers cheap, then the market will grow.
GNA (Gna's Not American) Yeah, that's pretty weak, I admit.
Yes, it is. Try this.
Canadians: Red Toque.
Getcha red hot Red Flag!
www.redflag-linux.com/peixun/ecb.html
Yes, there is something; ads. Wait! Ads online are incredibly intrusive and annoying. In mag format, they just flip on by without taking up screen space.
True, many of the ads are irrelevant, but some are informative. You may actually find out about a company/product of interest to you. Even if you aren't shopping, perusing the ads does may give you some new perspective on where Linux is going (or where co's want to take it for you).
A small benefit? Yes. Useful to *some* people? Definitely. Useful to you? I dunno...
Just my $.02 worth.
Looked at the headline and thought "Hmmm, I haven't gotten that much more spam...". Spam seems to be a bit of a misnomer here. Sure, there is some increase in holiday advertising and such, but spam (i.e. unsolicited e-mail) isn't what they are really complaining about here.
In the body of the article, they describe how jokes, animations, and greeting cards are clogging the system. Well, duh! Ask the USPS. They get clogged with lots of this stuff at this time of year; they're called Christmas cards.
This isn't really spam per se. It generally comes from people you know, even if you only hear from them once a year. Somehow the mailman and my mailbox cope with the onslaught every year. If your corporate infrastructure can't handle it, well what will you do if there is a legitimate boost in business traffic?
I guess these people will just crack the whip on corporate use policies again. Fat lot of good that seems to do.
All this trumpeting about %650 increased spam is an alarmist waste. (Not that I really want any more of the tons of weight-loss pills; credit fixing programs; appeals from Nigerian humanitarian organizations looking for my bank account number, promising free money for my help.)
Definitely run what you like now, but run plenty of conduit with pull strings for later. PVC is probably fine, but metal conduit can be had cheap/free too from salvage. The EMI shielding is a nice plus. Just make sure you that you keep an eye out for any grounding issues. And if you think you have enough conduit, run more just in case. It'll make your life easier to avoid congested conduit in the future. It can never hurt to leave yourself some leeway.
This is just what I need. I think Werie can really make a go of it. Now is a good opportunity for them.
1. ATT just gave everyone one more reason to hate them. Nobody like the cable companies. Would I trade speed for convenience? Yes, at the speeds they have.
2. DSL still isn't an option for me. I live on the peninsula south of SF, but distance and really bad line noise make DSL impractical.
3. Cost saving. By renogiating pole-costs for free service to cities, Aerie will save money; guarantee modem maunfacturers/distributors a steady market; and build mindshare.
4. Changed the image. City employees who like it (assuming the service is as good as it was) will be walking ads. They may get their own service off the clock. Also, their friends/neighbors may be convinced this is a good thing. Nothing like seeing a new option in operation to show people that it really works and they are not taking a risk. This is important to reach a broad popular base. It would also help to shake the stupid Austin Powers-esque / Mobile spy image in Metricom's old ads. Do you really need to surf the web as your sports car cruises the tarmac to your jet?
Essentially, the service worked like a convenient fixed-wireless network for my friends. Boot up the laptop at home, at work, or over at someone else's house- not on the tilt-a-whirl.
Aerie should sell this as a non-intrusive way to get always on service for people who hate the telco/cable co. Sell it as a way to get net access at work without monitoring by your employer. Sell it to cities/governments/utilities as a redundant network for when the phone/cable service tanks. If I recall, the network was brought up in Manhattan to help with rescue efforts.
5. I hope they make a go fo it. I need the service and will pay those rates for it.
As far as P.Eng's go, I stand corrected. I confess was thinking more along the lines of software and such.
Just curious, but are the registration requirements very different in different provinces?
OTOH, when I want money I ask for it, and if I don't get it I go elsewhere if the market lets me.
"If the market lets me" is a key part of why teachers need good union representation. Ever try to look for a decent teaching job mid-school year? I can tell you it ain't no fun. There is far less fluidity in the education market than in engineering. What if you only had one window of opportunity to change jobs in any calendar year? That cube would start to feel even more confining than it already does.
Also, you may not be able to move as easily as people in other professions. The market is limited by government regulation. Certification rules vary. Do you need a different license to be a geek in a different state? I didn't think so.
the really great PDAs that they have in Japan?
I use a Hitachi Persona and my wife can't live without her Sigmarion. These are little half laptop size WinCE based PDA/palmtops. Clam shell design with up to half VGA display, full(enough) size keyboard, plenty of ram for your purposes, PCMCIA support, built in modem, and great touch screens.
I don't know if there is the kind of equation editor you are looking for, but it is very easy to mix keyboard input and touch-screen-scrawled bitmaps in a single doc.
NEC sells some outside Japan, and they are great. The trouble is price. I picked mine up second hand in Osaka for about 200 USD. Great value if you can cope with the Japanese OS. The lack of market volume in the west means that deals like this are hard to find. You can find some NEC 780 or 790 models on eBay and such.
For me the form factor beats iPaq etc hands down. Plenty of screen real estate, but easy to carry. Not pocket-size, but most PDA's wind up in backpacks, cases, etc anyhow. A real keyboard makes any kind of writing easy.
If you are so inclined and have the time, you can get Linux to run on some of them, too.
Actually, it is whatever level of service is stated in the contract/service agreement with the customer. Regardless of the economic or technical realities the company faces, they are bound by the commitement that they make when they sell the service.
;)
Actually, it is whatever level of service is stated in the little slip of paper coated with legalese slipped in the back of your bill from time to time stating that their policies have changed. How many of these little updates, revision of service announcements, clarifications, or whatever they call them have you received from the phone/cable/isp/credit card company and just plain ignored because they are generally impenetrable and not worth your time?
Lawyers gat paid big bucks to create this kind of ambiguity. You can just suck it up, terminate the service, or figure out another work-around
as far as he goes. Yes, corporate interests will sell out ideals for cash. Is this news?
/. is for tech issues, too. OK, Net access is blocked outside of Riyadh with US corporate help. The way I see it, that creates a market hungry for porn, South Park, Salman Rushdie novels, and Britney.
Yes, the Net is being throttled in some places. This is simply an instance of the far more pervasive and damaging censorship that has always gone on. (Compare newspaper-reader-years to net-surfer-years in China.)
But, to Katz' argument, are corporations under some obligation to export US rhetoric re: free speech? I don't think so. Do corporations do anything within reason to make a buck? Sure.
Let's look at how they will make a buck next. I like to see politics here, but
Here is the incentive for other companies to throw up another satellite and bypass the chokepoints. I understand that two-way (no phone line req'd satellite-based net service is just over the horizon.)Illicit sat dishes have been a feature of Iran rooftops for years.
That is just the first idea off the top of my head. The point is that companies are motivated by cash. Governments are motivated by a whole lot of things, including paranoia. One corp will sell blocking software, another will sell tools to get around it somehow. Sell to both sides.
Does this solve the problems with governments everywhere poking around where they don't belong? No, but it is a start. Remember the power of technology to subvert governments has a long track record.
On a final note, more insidious is the bastardization and dumbing down of culture. Katz mentioned Harry Potter. What the hell is a Sorceror's Stone? Last time I checked it was a Philosopher's Stone. Why must the US public continue to put up with corporations blocking access to the real goods to line their pockets...?
I know this will piss some (many) people off, but I often find these domain name spats touchingly irrelevant.
...sucks... on a domain doesn't offer much in the way of real criticism. Effective activism isn't as easy as calling people names. If it's just a prank, then isn't all the hoopla a bit overblown?
o ly.html
In the long term, will domain name shortage be a real and continuing problem?
Just putting
Corporate dominance of public discourse is not a new problem. All the free access to domain names in the world will not overcome the fact that most of what most people see/read/hear is controlled by a relatively small group of greedy people. The world is poorer for it, but this is old news.
Try reading some pulped tree products for a great discussion of these problems. I'd start with Ben Bagdikian's classic, The Media Monopoly-- http://www.commoncouragepress.com/bagdikian_monop
You'll find some more pressing media control issues than "...sucks.com".
When you pay for this kind of tracking
...the management doesn't seem to add any accountability. Until management cares enough to track where and when the damage occurs, and uses that information...
will you be able to afford to ship anything?
Cost/benefit wins again, as usual.
...In the proper shipping container, probably via UPS.
I've shipped all kinds of computers, monitors, and other peripherals (even ceramics, large mirrors, bottles of wine, and antiques) domestically and internationally by package services, container freight, as checked airline luggage, by truck, and just plain old mail. Plenty of damage to the boxes, but no damage to the contents *ever*.
They may take up space, but the original shipping cartons are designed to take the punishment. If you don't want to, or can't keep yours, get one that some new purchaser has just gotten rid of. If you can't do that, pack properly.
Use bubble wrap, lots of it. Get styrofoam from the trash somewhere. Nest packed cartons inside of cartons. Pack the cartons full. If the contents are even slightly loose (as these seem to have been) then "Contents may settle during shipping." Look in you next box of Triscuits and checkout the dust at the bottom.
Insure everything that is of any value to you.
If the contents are valuable, isn't it worth an evening of your time to do it right?
It's not UPS vs FEDEX vs whatever. They all hire cheap labor to do something as quickly and cheaply as they can. They all suck at babysitting your plastic knick-knacks. Shipping companies do not care about your personal possessions. You do. Take some responsibility.
Or now that you're in America you can sue. Good Luck!