$700, $1200 - whatever. Costs about the same as a CSU/DSU. QoS is far worse, sure, but he's still getting a huge deal, one that most phone companies simply wouldn't allow. Call up your local telco and ask for a dry pair, and they're either gone (If you live in Ca., like me) or cost a couple hundred a month. This guy has some cool God-company that knowingly lets him do this (simply unheard of these days) and doesn't jack his rates up, which they could legally do. Hence my contention that he's getting a kickass bargain that's practically a T1. I think the only reason this is happening is because he lives in a rural area where most of the copper isn't being used. All that extra RF that a DSL signal would spit out would certainly not go unnoticed in a populated area.
This is low - he is getting symmetric 768kbps DSL for about 20 bucks a month, with a 100% CIR. That's bascially a fractional T1 in all but name. It would cost probably $8000-$10000 per year including ISP service in the real world. I'd say he's getting a steal.
Alright time to clue me in - AFAICT this is neither digital nor analog. It's a big wire running from point A to point B. No matter how you're transmitting the signal, digitally, analog, whatever, I don't get the analog/digital circuit distinction.
I never did understand the whole dry pair deal, although I've heard of people doing this before. I seems like running 5 miles of copper cable would cost a lot more than twenty bucks a month.. what am I missing here?
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Re:I've got dibbs on the first lawsuit.
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
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· Score: 2
What an asinine comment. It's perfectly legal and a lot of people have done it.
It's not your fault, but you've been seduced by the same "Shakespeare philosophy" that most everyone in the world has: that the people who make the best "art" are the ones either doing it for the money or making a lot of money from it. While it was for the Bard, in almost all cases this is just not true. What follows is pure judgement, but I've found that most of the things played on the radio, MTV, and recieving Grammies, blows. I don't know if I'm growing up, or what, but it seems like music has gotten just horrible in the past few years, especially w/r/t hiphop & "alternative" (whatever that is). Conversely, most of the music I listen to and actually enjoy is from rather obscure bands that no one has heard of.
I'm not trying to be a too-good-for-the-mainstream elitist when I say this, but rather to prove a point: the best artists usually, nay, almost always, aren't making a ton of money. Look no further than the Billboard charts to see what I mean: both the Backstreet Boys & N'Sync, who literally have no - no - artistic talent (they were assembled, don't write their own songs, don't create their own dance routines, or even their own dance styles (we have Michael Jackson to thank for that), really can't sing, etc.) are raking in millions of dollars right now. Same with Ms. Spears and all the rest. I'm not saying everyone in big-time music is a sellout, but the first people to cry foul when MP3s cut palpably into their record sales would be the aforementioned.
In relation to what you said, namely "If creators of content stop making money, they stop making content," well, this is wrong. You make the flawed assumption that CD sales would simply dry up like a well, when in reality it has been shown again and again (anecdotally) that people who download MP3s find themselves buying more CDs. Hell, with all the progress MP3s made last year, Napster, Lycos creating an MP3 search, more bandwidth, CD sales still rose 10%. People want the convenience of a CD, or whatever will succeed them, and very very few people know or have the motivation to convert their MP3s to WAVs and burn them in comparison to how many are buying CDs as a whole.
Without even getting into the issues of concerts and merchandise sales, I'd conjecture that it will always be possible for an artist to make money, even without "a new paradigm". But let's assume you are right for a moment; CD sales drop drastically and the business becomes a lot less lucrative - is this really a bad thing? I don't think so. The first people to cry foul at such a situation would be people who only care about the money - vis. the Spears, Simpsons, and N'Sync's of the world. And as I said above, I think they suck. That's my opinion, but it's also a lot of other ppl's. I hear it all the time.
Artistry is a labor of love, not money, and history supports me. I'm hard pressed to think of a truly prolific (thus, talented) artist who was motivated purely by cash, fame, or legacy. Hawthorne, Van Goch, Beethoven, Hemingway, Hendrix, even the Beatles, in the end - more or less, none of them gave a fuck. The artists who would throw in the towel simply because a certain portion of their sales? Maybe they should find a new job, because I have yet to find one who is worth listening to anyways. Nail me all you want for the "small artist" just trying to eek out a living, but remember I'm assuming that CDs won't ever be phased out in favor of pirated MP3s, and I think I'm right. Me may reach a point (probably will) where a critical mass of people have the technical know and sufficient motivation to will this into a reality. But that takes time, and in that time will come new formats with more piracy protection, and the pendulum will swing back towards the record companies as audio piracy again becomes an obscure little hobby taken up by techies and poor, smart college kids.
It will always be possible for talented people to make money showcasing their work, simply because a lot of people are willing to pay to appreciate talent - if you've ever spent a couple hundred bucks on front row seats for a Lakers game or tennis match, you know what I'm about. People will not pay for talent, and if your work consists or two or three marginally catchy radio singles and twelve turkey songs with little replay value, then MP3 will kill you, because people will get the same satisfaction from MP3 that they might from your CD (get who I'm talking about? hint - already mentioned them twice). For anyone that is worthwhile to listen to, that produces intersting, I say you have nothing to worry about.
XML wouldn't make the actual config file a lot more useful (OPTION=(Y|M), yawn) but it could spread through other parts of the kernel and simplify them a lot; namely the build scripts which are a bitch to follow hard to adapt to your situation e.g. have you ever tried to just build a single module in the tree? G'luck.. I see XML having some potential uses here. I agree that XML isn't necessarily a panacea, but I don't think it's intended to be; rather, it's just supposed to be a extremely versatile and eXtended language that can be used for most anything. Think about how much easier our lives would be if all config files adhered to a set standard. No more arcane, abstract syntax created on the whim of some hacker. My god, I might even switch back to sendmail:)
Strange... I've been doing both of those just fine with a 2-year-old G3. QuickTime has supported software MPEG playback since version 2.5, which is at least three years old.
Come on, you knew what he meant. MPEG1 is a dying format and realtime MPEG2 encoding does require a lot more harder to do realtime encoding. Yes, I'd say it was 6 mos. to a year ago when realtime MPEG2 decoding became feasible (for DVDs), but the quality and framerates are still a long ways from being as good as a hardware decoder (a/long/ ways), simply because it eats tons of CPU.
Aside from being so old and hackneyed that my 79 year old grandfather told me this joke at Thanksgiving last year, it's not true. LSD was not developed at Berkeley.
Huh? Yes. CDE is a royally inefficient pain in the ass, and it's not exactly performing voodoo under all those pretty pictures. I never use it. dtterm is my friend.
This post is, albeit to a lesser extent, in the same pointless vein as the one about buying Iridium and "open sourcing" it. Things that are boring, don't impress your friends, or don't scratch an itch typically will not exist open source. Programming RDBMS is (I imagine) highly theoretical, scientific work, and while a few CS wizards out there might get a kick out of it, such a project would never reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. It just doesn't meet any of those criteria.
At times people seem to get carried away with the Open Source phenomenon. We need to remember to take a step back and realize what an incredibly miniscule blip on the radar of innovation that OSS is, and that for a good three decades conventional development models produced some great things. Relational database code is one of them.
Cute, but it will never work. First, these are nothing more than GSM satellite towers ejected into space. That's it. I'm serious; some of the parts have the same model numbers as GSM cell tower stuff. Getting to play with satellites is cool, but you need to play with something that is actually worthwhile. If I could buy the DirecTV satellite, or a spy satellite, now that would be cool. But there are nothing more than expensive, cold radio repeaters. You get about 9600 baud. If you really have your heart set on communicating around the world, save a couple million and buy a packet radio...
It's a passthru port. You cannot plug it in without drawing current from the keyboard port, which will cause the internal keyboard to shut off. Instead of a bulky transformer power supply, now you get to carry around a full size keyboard. All the hubs I know that draw their power like this are keyboard passthru; I haven't heard of one that works with a mouse (although the power for a mouse and keyboard could be the same; I don't know). At any rate, it would still be the same problem; using the mouse port would disable the internal mouse, forcing you to carry a mouse around.
Named after Buckminster Fuller. The chemical formula is C60 and the actual name is "Buckminsterfullerene". Who said scientists don't have a sense of humor?;)
It's 'dyed'. I'm still alive, and I wish I could tell you differently, but I'm not a shareholder.
And here's/your/ fatal flaw: making the assumption that shopping for a washing machine and shopping for books are the same thing. They are not. People, even me, love to go to the store to try out what they buy. I used to do this with computers before I knew enough, and I still do it with clothing, appliances, etc. Those are the things people want to "touch and feel" or catalog shop. It's just not in our nature to make large purchases sight unseen.
None of that is true for books. I have never catalog shopped for books, and neither have you. Don't try to claim to the contrary. Shopping for books does not fall under the same paradigm as "traditional retailing." Tourists don't go book shopping. Either you've never traveled or you have never seen tourists, but the only time they buy a book is to pass the time in transit. Tourists shop for amusing things - necklaces, postcards, whatever. People like to shop, and they always will, but not for stacks of paper.
Books are cheap enough that no one really minds One-Clicking a few, because if they are great or if they suck, you're still only out ten bucks. I couldn't say the same for a microwave or dress, where you have to try it one or check out all the features. Furthermore, Amazon.com provides a very convenient service in customer reviews and sales rankings for every product. "Still not sure about whether you should buy this book? Here, look at what other people had to say. Look at how many people are buying this book." Some people like to spend time in bookstores. I love it. But a lot don't. They are busy, and they heard about this cool new sci-fi novel or biography, and they just want to log on for two minutes, click the mouse a few times, forget about it, and be pleasantly surprised when the book is waiting at their doorstep a few days later. Amazon, with One-Click, has made this about as easy as it can be, and that's why people paid them over half a billion dollars last year.
That was my thinking. I know a lot of competent and disciplined people who served in the military. More like, most of the competent and disciplined people I know were in the armed forces or something like it. Especially with a well defined chain of command and rigid oversight, I just don't think that they are capable of creating such a comedy of errors. Okay - it's stupid enough to hook all your tanks up to the internet. I don't buy it, but let's say it happened. But then would they really go out and advertise this to the world? Of course not. This is the government! Master of masters when it comes to coverups and hushing a sensitive situation. I think this is more a product of sensational reporting than of stupidity on the part of the Army.
That just what I'm saying won't happen. Wall Street is not dictating their fate here. They sold 600 million dollars of stuff last year. The only reason they didn't break even was because they spent even more than that building for the future - spending on advertising, building brand awareness, implementing new features. If they would just all that right now, they would be a profitable company. It's not an attractive option, but it's doable. Bezos and his cronies are smart enough to head something like a collapse of the company off at the pass. I don't think they would let it get to the point where their stock will be selling for pennies a share and they face a possible buyout before they become a lot more interested in pacifying their backers.
Oh stop your celebrating.. Amazon is not going to "fail" or "collapse". It isn't going anywhere. Supply meets demand, folks. People demand Amazon's services. They enjoy spending just two minutes out of their day to have the latest bestseller, or chart-topping CD, video, DVD, etc. sent to them. Amazon provides a convenient service that a lot, a lot, of people use. They have built on literally 6 (?) years of immense brand name recognition which isn't going anywhere soon. By brand-name recognition I mean not just word of mouth or prior customers, but a colossal advertising campaign that includes superbowls, a virtual saturation of the pre-Christmas airwaves, and a even Time Man of the Year. They have had arguably, just maybe, more exposure and mindshare than any company in the past year. Any company. In the world. Say what you want about brand loyalty disappearing on the net, but when people think of buying books online, they think of Amazon.com. As long as that's true, there will always be a market for them, and they will be in that market. They will change, granted - shareholders probably won't shrug off Bezos' foraging into other areas (toys, auctions) and uncharted territory, resulting in huge losses, like they have in the past. There might be a restructuring of the company. But the company itself will be here for a while. And, sadly, as long as that is true, so will their ridiculous patents;)
Also, I think that highly-paid technical workers are a relative minority in the world, and even in the United States. Since when do we need political advocacy? Maybe we will in the future at some point, but certainly not now.
That statement does not make sense. "We," define it how you may, are a minority. Therefore we need political advocacy. If "we" were a majority, then we would not need political advocacy - our conscience would be that of the people, and "we" would get the laws "we" wanted to see passed. Claiming that a group does not need a voice in politics because it is a new minority is ludicrous! The whole reason advocacy exists is for the minorities - hence the NAACP, NOW, hell even the KKK represents an outspoken minority of white supremacists. On the whole, I don't see too many comfortable majorities with action committees, etc. Have you ever heard of the National Organization of White People? The Concerned Anglo-Saxon Protestants of America?
Nope.
I just don't see that thought/logic in that idea. We need advocacy because we are a minority, not in spite of it.
So there is a basis for having some sort of voice in politics. I agree that geek is a vague and cliche word (My best friend is a sci-fi 'geek', and personally he doesn't give a shit about patent reform), but there is a great need for people involved in the information industry to speak their minds in politics. A lot of these people are geeks, some aren't; I think the person who asked the question got caught up in the Slashdot vernacular. Perhaps 'information professionals' is a better term - whatever. But the point is that there is a need to voice our views, and you shouldn't be dissuading that by saying we are too much of a minority to have representation. It is this sort of laissez-faire attitude that allowed CDA I and II, UCITA, the One-Click fiasco et al. to come about. We (IT professionals) are sorely lacking representation in politics, and it's biting us in the ass. I mean, come on - the Vice-fscking-President claimed he invented the Internet and that tale had to leave Washington before someone finally called him on it. The people making the laws in this country are comparative Luddites to the people actually driving the "information-based economy" which those same politicians love to wax ecstatical about. This is wrong. We do need our voice to be heard, and we should never give up because we are the outspoken minority. History has taught us that much.
I disagree. It's the fact that I can buy a GeForce 3D accelerator that literally destroys SGI's top of the line from a few years ago that killed SGI. The bottom simply fell out of the 3D market, in the early 90s, enabling a kid with a $2000 PC to have as much power and rendering capability, for the most part, as an entry level Indy. Silicon Graphics, as the name implies, had always had the graphics segment of the market cornered and hands down was better than anything Wintel could muster up. This is not true anymore; the graphics hardware available for PC beats all but the extreme top of the line stuff available for Irix/SGI/Unix. Luckily for Sun no major revolution came along in hard drives or processors, or else you might see them in the same position SGI is in now. Instead, they continue to fill their coffers because the server market is still quite lucrative. This is not true for the workstation graphics market, which basically endured a paradigm shift recently. If you had to pick one creation that killed SGI, I guess you could say 3dfx.
Actually, it will make it/less/ difficult. Remember how expensive plain old 10BT ethernet used to be? Remember how much cheaper it got when 100BT became the norm? Terabit technology will only serve to make gigabit, or whatever, the cheaper norm. Sure, the links will be slower, but hey, it's better than nothing.
Who said anything about the Army? There are four other branches of the "Armed Services," smart guy. Certainly you learned that one in basic. Anyways, you're still wrong, but I'd just like to point that out.
Here they use them in Bosnia. Here they are used by the ARMY Corps of Engineers. Here's the CEO of Iridium saying "We have crystal clear communications. With the freedom to use the Iridium phones in helicopters and Army trucks, and area of total devastation and no electricity. Here is a story about the DoD reserving Iridium satellite time. Perhaps you would like to chew on the line "The Army, Navy and Air Force are testing ways to integrate the Iridium satellite network into their communications plans" for a while. It's in the first paragraph. Here's a conspicuously obvious one titled "Army to Use Iridium Pagers."
It seems like with a little research (little meaning like, 20-30 seconds) would've shown you how wrong you really are. I suggest you do just that before posting next time.
Slashdot Mirror
$700, $1200 - whatever. Costs about the same as a CSU/DSU. QoS is far worse, sure, but he's still getting a huge deal, one that most phone companies simply wouldn't allow. Call up your local telco and ask for a dry pair, and they're either gone (If you live in Ca., like me) or cost a couple hundred a month. This guy has some cool God-company that knowingly lets him do this (simply unheard of these days) and doesn't jack his rates up, which they could legally do. Hence my contention that he's getting a kickass bargain that's practically a T1. I think the only reason this is happening is because he lives in a rural area where most of the copper isn't being used. All that extra RF that a DSL signal would spit out would certainly not go unnoticed in a populated area.
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This is low - he is getting symmetric 768kbps DSL for about 20 bucks a month, with a 100% CIR. That's bascially a fractional T1 in all but name. It would cost probably $8000-$10000 per year including ISP service in the real world. I'd say he's getting a steal.
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Alright time to clue me in - AFAICT this is neither digital nor analog. It's a big wire running from point A to point B. No matter how you're transmitting the signal, digitally, analog, whatever, I don't get the analog/digital circuit distinction.
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I never did understand the whole dry pair deal, although I've heard of people doing this before. I seems like running 5 miles of copper cable would cost a lot more than twenty bucks a month.. what am I missing here?
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What an asinine comment. It's perfectly legal and a lot of people have done it.
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It's not your fault, but you've been seduced by the same "Shakespeare philosophy" that most everyone in the world has: that the people who make the best "art" are the ones either doing it for the money or making a lot of money from it. While it was for the Bard, in almost all cases this is just not true. What follows is pure judgement, but I've found that most of the things played on the radio, MTV, and recieving Grammies, blows. I don't know if I'm growing up, or what, but it seems like music has gotten just horrible in the past few years, especially w/r/t hiphop & "alternative" (whatever that is). Conversely, most of the music I listen to and actually enjoy is from rather obscure bands that no one has heard of.
I'm not trying to be a too-good-for-the-mainstream elitist when I say this, but rather to prove a point: the best artists usually, nay, almost always, aren't making a ton of money. Look no further than the Billboard charts to see what I mean: both the Backstreet Boys & N'Sync, who literally have no - no - artistic talent (they were assembled, don't write their own songs, don't create their own dance routines, or even their own dance styles (we have Michael Jackson to thank for that), really can't sing, etc.) are raking in millions of dollars right now. Same with Ms. Spears and all the rest. I'm not saying everyone in big-time music is a sellout, but the first people to cry foul when MP3s cut palpably into their record sales would be the aforementioned.
In relation to what you said, namely "If creators of content stop making money, they stop making content," well, this is wrong. You make the flawed assumption that CD sales would simply dry up like a well, when in reality it has been shown again and again (anecdotally) that people who download MP3s find themselves buying more CDs. Hell, with all the progress MP3s made last year, Napster, Lycos creating an MP3 search, more bandwidth, CD sales still rose 10%. People want the convenience of a CD, or whatever will succeed them, and very very few people know or have the motivation to convert their MP3s to WAVs and burn them in comparison to how many are buying CDs as a whole.
Without even getting into the issues of concerts and merchandise sales, I'd conjecture that it will always be possible for an artist to make money, even without "a new paradigm". But let's assume you are right for a moment; CD sales drop drastically and the business becomes a lot less lucrative - is this really a bad thing? I don't think so. The first people to cry foul at such a situation would be people who only care about the money - vis. the Spears, Simpsons, and N'Sync's of the world. And as I said above, I think they suck. That's my opinion, but it's also a lot of other ppl's. I hear it all the time.
Artistry is a labor of love, not money, and history supports me. I'm hard pressed to think of a truly prolific (thus, talented) artist who was motivated purely by cash, fame, or legacy. Hawthorne, Van Goch, Beethoven, Hemingway, Hendrix, even the Beatles, in the end - more or less, none of them gave a fuck. The artists who would throw in the towel simply because a certain portion of their sales? Maybe they should find a new job, because I have yet to find one who is worth listening to anyways. Nail me all you want for the "small artist" just trying to eek out a living, but remember I'm assuming that CDs won't ever be phased out in favor of pirated MP3s, and I think I'm right. Me may reach a point (probably will) where a critical mass of people have the technical know and sufficient motivation to will this into a reality. But that takes time, and in that time will come new formats with more piracy protection, and the pendulum will swing back towards the record companies as audio piracy again becomes an obscure little hobby taken up by techies and poor, smart college kids.
It will always be possible for talented people to make money showcasing their work, simply because a lot of people are willing to pay to appreciate talent - if you've ever spent a couple hundred bucks on front row seats for a Lakers game or tennis match, you know what I'm about. People will not pay for talent, and if your work consists or two or three marginally catchy radio singles and twelve turkey songs with little replay value, then MP3 will kill you, because people will get the same satisfaction from MP3 that they might from your CD (get who I'm talking about? hint - already mentioned them twice). For anyone that is worthwhile to listen to, that produces intersting, I say you have nothing to worry about.
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XML wouldn't make the actual config file a lot more useful (OPTION=(Y|M), yawn) but it could spread through other parts of the kernel and simplify them a lot; namely the build scripts which are a bitch to follow hard to adapt to your situation e.g. have you ever tried to just build a single module in the tree? G'luck.. I see XML having some potential uses here. I agree that XML isn't necessarily a panacea, but I don't think it's intended to be; rather, it's just supposed to be a extremely versatile and eXtended language that can be used for most anything. Think about how much easier our lives would be if all config files adhered to a set standard. No more arcane, abstract syntax created on the whim of some hacker. My god, I might even switch back to sendmail :)
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Strange... I've been doing both of those just fine with a 2-year-old G3. QuickTime has supported software MPEG playback since version 2.5, which is at least three years old.
/long/ ways), simply because it eats tons of CPU.
Come on, you knew what he meant. MPEG1 is a dying format and realtime MPEG2 encoding does require a lot more harder to do realtime encoding. Yes, I'd say it was 6 mos. to a year ago when realtime MPEG2 decoding became feasible (for DVDs), but the quality and framerates are still a long ways from being as good as a hardware decoder (a
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ten bucks a hit.
just like acid.
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Aside from being so old and hackneyed that my 79 year old grandfather told me this joke at Thanksgiving last year, it's not true. LSD was not developed at Berkeley.
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Huh? Yes. CDE is a royally inefficient pain in the ass, and it's not exactly performing voodoo under all those pretty pictures. I never use it. dtterm is my friend.
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This post is, albeit to a lesser extent, in the same pointless vein as the one about buying Iridium and "open sourcing" it. Things that are boring, don't impress your friends, or don't scratch an itch typically will not exist open source. Programming RDBMS is (I imagine) highly theoretical, scientific work, and while a few CS wizards out there might get a kick out of it, such a project would never reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. It just doesn't meet any of those criteria.
At times people seem to get carried away with the Open Source phenomenon. We need to remember to take a step back and realize what an incredibly miniscule blip on the radar of innovation that OSS is, and that for a good three decades conventional development models produced some great things. Relational database code is one of them.
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Cute, but it will never work. First, these are nothing more than GSM satellite towers ejected into space. That's it. I'm serious; some of the parts have the same model numbers as GSM cell tower stuff. Getting to play with satellites is cool, but you need to play with something that is actually worthwhile. If I could buy the DirecTV satellite, or a spy satellite, now that would be cool. But there are nothing more than expensive, cold radio repeaters. You get about 9600 baud. If you really have your heart set on communicating around the world, save a couple million and buy a packet radio...
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It's a passthru port. You cannot plug it in without drawing current from the keyboard port, which will cause the internal keyboard to shut off. Instead of a bulky transformer power supply, now you get to carry around a full size keyboard. All the hubs I know that draw their power like this are keyboard passthru; I haven't heard of one that works with a mouse (although the power for a mouse and keyboard could be the same; I don't know). At any rate, it would still be the same problem; using the mouse port would disable the internal mouse, forcing you to carry a mouse around.
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That's kind of useless when he has laptops and a palmtop.
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Named after Buckminster Fuller. The chemical formula is C60 and the actual name is "Buckminsterfullerene". Who said scientists don't have a sense of humor? ;)
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It's 'dyed'. I'm still alive, and I wish I could tell you differently, but I'm not a shareholder.
/your/ fatal flaw: making the assumption that shopping for a washing machine and shopping for books are the same thing. They are not. People, even me, love to go to the store to try out what they buy. I used to do this with computers before I knew enough, and I still do it with clothing, appliances, etc. Those are the things people want to "touch and feel" or catalog shop. It's just not in our nature to make large purchases sight unseen.
And here's
None of that is true for books. I have never catalog shopped for books, and neither have you. Don't try to claim to the contrary. Shopping for books does not fall under the same paradigm as "traditional retailing." Tourists don't go book shopping. Either you've never traveled or you have never seen tourists, but the only time they buy a book is to pass the time in transit. Tourists shop for amusing things - necklaces, postcards, whatever. People like to shop, and they always will, but not for stacks of paper.
Books are cheap enough that no one really minds One-Clicking a few, because if they are great or if they suck, you're still only out ten bucks. I couldn't say the same for a microwave or dress, where you have to try it one or check out all the features. Furthermore, Amazon.com provides a very convenient service in customer reviews and sales rankings for every product. "Still not sure about whether you should buy this book? Here, look at what other people had to say. Look at how many people are buying this book." Some people like to spend time in bookstores. I love it. But a lot don't. They are busy, and they heard about this cool new sci-fi novel or biography, and they just want to log on for two minutes, click the mouse a few times, forget about it, and be pleasantly surprised when the book is waiting at their doorstep a few days later. Amazon, with One-Click, has made this about as easy as it can be, and that's why people paid them over half a billion dollars last year.
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That was my thinking. I know a lot of competent and disciplined people who served in the military. More like, most of the competent and disciplined people I know were in the armed forces or something like it. Especially with a well defined chain of command and rigid oversight, I just don't think that they are capable of creating such a comedy of errors. Okay - it's stupid enough to hook all your tanks up to the internet. I don't buy it, but let's say it happened. But then would they really go out and advertise this to the world? Of course not. This is the government! Master of masters when it comes to coverups and hushing a sensitive situation. I think this is more a product of sensational reporting than of stupidity on the part of the Army.
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That just what I'm saying won't happen. Wall Street is not dictating their fate here. They sold 600 million dollars of stuff last year. The only reason they didn't break even was because they spent even more than that building for the future - spending on advertising, building brand awareness, implementing new features. If they would just all that right now, they would be a profitable company. It's not an attractive option, but it's doable. Bezos and his cronies are smart enough to head something like a collapse of the company off at the pass. I don't think they would let it get to the point where their stock will be selling for pennies a share and they face a possible buyout before they become a lot more interested in pacifying their backers.
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Oh stop your celebrating.. Amazon is not going to "fail" or "collapse". It isn't going anywhere. Supply meets demand, folks. People demand Amazon's services. They enjoy spending just two minutes out of their day to have the latest bestseller, or chart-topping CD, video, DVD, etc. sent to them. Amazon provides a convenient service that a lot, a lot, of people use. They have built on literally 6 (?) years of immense brand name recognition which isn't going anywhere soon. By brand-name recognition I mean not just word of mouth or prior customers, but a colossal advertising campaign that includes superbowls, a virtual saturation of the pre-Christmas airwaves, and a even Time Man of the Year. They have had arguably, just maybe, more exposure and mindshare than any company in the past year. Any company. In the world. Say what you want about brand loyalty disappearing on the net, but when people think of buying books online, they think of Amazon.com. As long as that's true, there will always be a market for them, and they will be in that market. They will change, granted - shareholders probably won't shrug off Bezos' foraging into other areas (toys, auctions) and uncharted territory, resulting in huge losses, like they have in the past. There might be a restructuring of the company. But the company itself will be here for a while. And, sadly, as long as that is true, so will their ridiculous patents ;)
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Also, I think that highly-paid technical workers are a relative minority in the world, and even in the United States. Since when do we need political advocacy? Maybe we will in the future at some point, but certainly not now.
That statement does not make sense. "We," define it how you may, are a minority. Therefore we need political advocacy. If "we" were a majority, then we would not need political advocacy - our conscience would be that of the people, and "we" would get the laws "we" wanted to see passed. Claiming that a group does not need a voice in politics because it is a new minority is ludicrous! The whole reason advocacy exists is for the minorities - hence the NAACP, NOW, hell even the KKK represents an outspoken minority of white supremacists. On the whole, I don't see too many comfortable majorities with action committees, etc. Have you ever heard of the National Organization of White People? The Concerned Anglo-Saxon Protestants of America?
Nope.
I just don't see that thought/logic in that idea. We need advocacy because we are a minority, not in spite of it.
So there is a basis for having some sort of voice in politics. I agree that geek is a vague and cliche word (My best friend is a sci-fi 'geek', and personally he doesn't give a shit about patent reform), but there is a great need for people involved in the information industry to speak their minds in politics. A lot of these people are geeks, some aren't; I think the person who asked the question got caught up in the Slashdot vernacular. Perhaps 'information professionals' is a better term - whatever. But the point is that there is a need to voice our views, and you shouldn't be dissuading that by saying we are too much of a minority to have representation. It is this sort of laissez-faire attitude that allowed CDA I and II, UCITA, the One-Click fiasco et al. to come about. We (IT professionals) are sorely lacking representation in politics, and it's biting us in the ass. I mean, come on - the Vice-fscking-President claimed he invented the Internet and that tale had to leave Washington before someone finally called him on it. The people making the laws in this country are comparative Luddites to the people actually driving the "information-based economy" which those same politicians love to wax ecstatical about. This is wrong. We do need our voice to be heard, and we should never give up because we are the outspoken minority. History has taught us that much.
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I disagree. It's the fact that I can buy a GeForce 3D accelerator that literally destroys SGI's top of the line from a few years ago that killed SGI. The bottom simply fell out of the 3D market, in the early 90s, enabling a kid with a $2000 PC to have as much power and rendering capability, for the most part, as an entry level Indy. Silicon Graphics, as the name implies, had always had the graphics segment of the market cornered and hands down was better than anything Wintel could muster up. This is not true anymore; the graphics hardware available for PC beats all but the extreme top of the line stuff available for Irix/SGI/Unix. Luckily for Sun no major revolution came along in hard drives or processors, or else you might see them in the same position SGI is in now. Instead, they continue to fill their coffers because the server market is still quite lucrative. This is not true for the workstation graphics market, which basically endured a paradigm shift recently. If you had to pick one creation that killed SGI, I guess you could say 3dfx.
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From one of the many 2600 FAQs:
Alt.2600 is a Usenet newsgroup for discussion of material relating to 2600 Magazine, the hacker quarterly. It is NOT for the Atari 2600 game machine.
It doesn't say it, but the inference is that neither is the magazine.
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Actually, it will make it /less/ difficult. Remember how expensive plain old 10BT ethernet used to be? Remember how much cheaper it got when 100BT became the norm? Terabit technology will only serve to make gigabit, or whatever, the cheaper norm. Sure, the links will be slower, but hey, it's better than nothing.
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Who said anything about the Army? There are four other branches of the "Armed Services," smart guy. Certainly you learned that one in basic. Anyways, you're still wrong, but I'd just like to point that out.
Here they use them in Bosnia.
Here they are used by the ARMY Corps of Engineers.
Here's the CEO of Iridium saying "We have crystal clear communications. With the freedom to use the Iridium phones in helicopters and Army trucks, and area of total devastation and no electricity.
Here is a story about the DoD reserving Iridium satellite time. Perhaps you would like to chew on the line "The Army, Navy and Air Force are testing ways to integrate the Iridium satellite network into their communications plans" for a while. It's in the first paragraph.
Here's a conspicuously obvious one titled "Army to Use Iridium Pagers."
It seems like with a little research (little meaning like, 20-30 seconds) would've shown you how wrong you really are. I suggest you do just that before posting next time.
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