Any negotiations that Yahoo's board entered into were done in bad faith and in violation of the board's obligations to the shareholders that elected it.
What obligation is that? Is the board obligated to make a deal with Microsoft? Are they obligated to engage in a good faith negotiation with them?
You'd have to show that rejecting Microsoft's unsolicited bid was not in the best interests of Yahoo's shareholders. That may seem obvious to you now, but only time will tell. If they did negotiate in bad-faith, that is an affront to Microsoft, sure... but not grounds for a shareholder action per se. Keep in mind that they were responding to an unsolicited and unwelcome bid.
If we work on the broader problem then we get better web sites for everyone, especially the disabled, without even making any particular effort for them. For example:
- A link to download a file should just go to the file, not some clever javascript crap that tells you to please wait while you're redirected, your download should start in a few moments etc.
- Quit breaking stuff up into dozens of tiny bite sized pages. My scrollbar works just fine thank you very much, and it lets me scan all of the content in an instant instead of having to click through it all. Yes, I know that some people do this to goose their ad revenue, but you see it other places too.
- Don't use clever little graphics and pop-ups for every link, text works much better.
- I don't need links to "print this page" or "email it to a friend".
- You don't need to know what region of the world I'm in before I can download a damned printer driver.
- Don't use ridiculous URLs that query stuff from a CGI with a zillion arguments just to serve up a static page.
I could go on all day... fixing any of those design problems would automatically improve accessibility, not just for blind users but for mobile devices as well.
Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible "splash pages", flash animations, and musical home pages. I'm sure in due time people will get their head around some of the other basic issues I've mentioned, but unfortunately people keep coming up with dumb new ideas much faster than that.
Second, it is HIGHLY debatable whether there is any "agreement" at all -- much less "contract" -- between Apple and a PURCHASER of its operating system from a retail provider.
You seem to be in violent agreement with me there. I already said as much in my very first post!
I think you still don't understand what I'm on about. Google "inducing breach of contract".
Yes. Duh. I am well aware of the controversy over the enforceability of EULAs, and I so qualified my statement.
I was pointing out an angle on this that everyone else had missed - that the manufacturer could be liable here even though they are not a party to the EULA.
The interesting part of this is that they have vowed to challenge Apple's EULA in court
Good luck with that! They might think they're not in violation of the EULA because they're only distributing a boxed retail copy. However, by selling someone a non-Apple machine designed to run OSX, they are guilty of intentionally interfering with their customer's contract (EULA) with Apple. I.e. they are inducing a third party to breach their contract. However you feel about EULAs, as long as the court agrees that it's enforceable this is pretty cut and dry.
This is true whether they include the boxed copy or not. It's actually even easier to show because of the included boxed copy. However, even if they didn't include it they'd probably be in even more trouble because Apple could argue that they're additionally inducing people to pirate the OS. They're just fucked!
Some of you people need to get over yourselves. You're not important enough for the government to care about.
Really? I am on the TSA's terrorist watch list. I am not allowed to use electronic check in at the airport, and I get my bags searched every time. This is not my paranoid imagination - airport personnel have explicitly told me so... but when I've called TSA they won't take me off the list and they sure as hell won't tell me how I got on it.
What have I done? Hell if I know. I'm a white non-religious male. I've bought a spur-of-the-moment one-way plane tickets. I own guns. I've spoken out on Slashdot a time or two. I've googled some weird shit. I will never know exactly how I got on that damned list, but the fact of the matter is I am getting special scrutiny from Bush's cronies and I have no fucking idea why.
Maybe YOU haven't been inconvenienced by this regime yet, because you stay home and watch TV all day. Just try exercising your freedoms and see what happens.
So this is a whole hardware server module that you stuff into a switch? Why?
A switch (or router, whatever) chassis is a ridiculously valuable piece of real estate... why would you want to spend that slot space plugging in PCs when they could just as easily be somewhere else, on the end of an ethernet cable?
Or is this intended for some highly specialized application where the linux system in tightly integrated with the host hardware in some way?
No. The law is clear - if you run a red light, you broke the law. You had the choice not to run the light.
You'd be surprised. Have you ever actually read any of your state's traffic laws? There are tons of exceptions and extenuating circumstances which can get you of the hook for most things, particularly speeding, perfectly legally. Usually it just takes a little homework.
In this case I have no doubt that if I were to go before a judge and prove that the orange light timing had been tweaked to _below the legal requirement_ that I'd have no problem getting it dismissed. I don't know the specific code off the top of my head but I'm sure I could find something. I've had tickets dismissed on much less. IANAL but I expect there is something on the books that trumps traffic code here, i.e. where the one law has been broken by the police/govt in order to force you to break another.
Primarily from my experience owning a small ISP many years ago, but also as predicted by common sense, and furthermore as evidenced by a quick sampling of a few publicly available bandwidth plots for some high capacity links.
As an engineer for an ISP, our low point is only from approx 2-4 am.
Right, the point is, there is less usage at night. Maybe my "ton of bandwidth" is different from yours, but unless your links are saturated during the day, I'd be surprised if your nighttime low is more than 70% of your daytime high. That means loads of bandwidth that is not being used because people pay the same charges for it regardless of time of day. Take the area between that waveform and its peak level, and that is how many bytes of usage are simply going to waste on that link. People might use it if you had a system for selling it cheaper (and as a sibling poster notes, some ISPs actually do this).
Just in case your ISP is indeed some exception, try googling mrtg index to see what it looks like for the rest of world.
What you're proposing is basically to bring that sort of thing to the Internet itself, and I can't say that I want to wait until 2AM to save on my bandwidth bill.
You have missed the point. Would you still care if your total bandwidth bill ended up being a tenth as much?
The interesting question is not who pays, but how can we all collectively pay less for better performance? The problem is that the billing model for the internet is broken. ISPs need to start billing for usage, that much is obvious. But in addition, I think it would be really interesting if they billed based on a function of their actual cost for delivering every individual packet. I.e. if it stays in their network it's really cheap, if it goes through a peer then it's still pretty cheap, and if it goes to a transit provider then it gets expensive. the upstream ISP could in turn bill based on their cost to deliver it. Routers could pass along this metadata about the cost, accumulating it along each hop.
Obviously this has tremendous implications in terms of the additional work that routers would need to do to account for traffic, and how the costs are communicated to the customer. However, I think the end result would be something quite incredible, because what would happen is it would drive the development of smarter P2P protocols that keep traffic nearby, and widespread deployment of caches for static content and such. Right now there is very little incentive to do these things.
The end result, once everything has had a chance to adapt, would be a phenomenally efficient internet, with reduced costs and better performance all around. ISPs wouldn't give a hoot about this new class of "smart" P2P because the bulk of the traffic would stay among their local subscribers, the bandwidth to whom is free. Massive loads would be disappear from peering centers and long distance links. The cost of bandwidth would plummet.
I think all of this is feasible, and it's worth doing.
Unlike existing open source projects, these protocols/code/APIs have never been scrutinized by independent security experts. I'll bet this reveals hundreds of new attack vectors.
The title of the page has "t-mobile" in huge letter in magenta, as part of the words "engadget-mobile"
I could totally believe that a non-technical (ok, stupid) person might mistake this for an official t-mobile site.
branding consists of colors, words, typefaces, graphics, and this site mimics a couple of tmobile's elements. It doesn't seem to be a parody or any other such form of protected use.
I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.
But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too.
This is a good example of where the inefficient method (of about 60 moves iirc) is much faster in terms of time. The 25 move solution is elegant but just not worth it in terms of computations, time etc...
Proving that ALL cubes can be solved in 25 moves is not the same as solving A cube in 25 moves. I'd imagine if he can crunch the entire problem space of 400 billion configurations in 1500 hours, he can solve a single cube pretty damn quick.
The last version of Windows I could tolerate (and I'm being generous there) was 2000. I moved to XP for compatibility but fortunately you could easily change the look and feel to be exactly like 2000 (not like some kid barfed a stomachful of crayons across the screen).
Fortunately things have moved along and I am only depended on one or two legacy apps. I can do everything else on a Mac, and those couple of apps run fine in Parallels and I'll never have to upgrade them.
Thank goodness I can just ignore all the hoopla about Vista. "XP" should be dropped from this story's title - _Windows_ is altogether in its death throes.
Actually I do appreciate your point, and as others have pointed out "sham" doies have a specific meaning as used here. But could you comment on the bit I quoted:
In June 2003, the RIAA publicly announced that it would begin a campaign that would involve thousands of threats and sham lawsuits against individuals.
This is clearly putting words in the defendants mouth. Unless the RIAA really referred to their own suits as "shams", I would think this comment is out of line, and discredits the plaintiff.
In June 2003, the RIAA publicly announced that it would begin a campaign that would involve thousands of threats and sham lawsuits against individuals.
It goes on and on like this... plaintiff repeatedly referring to them as sham lawsuits, and in many cases, as above, suggesting that even the defendant acknowledged them as such.
Now don't get me wrong, I think all the lawyers representing RIAA and all principals of the record companies should be in jail (or worse). But this suit reads as inredibly amateurish to me, and if I were the judge I would get pretty irritated by being repeatedly told what to think, rather than the facts of the case.
I am hopeful that mankind can avoid ending up like in 1984, for the simple reason that the same technology that enables today's widespread spying by our government on its own citizens can also be leveraged to help us keep tabs on them. Even if they make sites like this one illegal, they will be hosted elsewhere. Furthermore, unless they figure out how to take away all of our camera cell phones, tiny solid state audio recorders, etc then we will continue to have vastly more power to document police corruption than we did just 10 years ago when you'd have to have a camcorder at hand, charged and with a tape in it, to capture anything.
I might even go so far as to say that I'd _like_ to see the government try and crack down on sites like this (and wikileaks etc), as this will only draw more attention to the problem, causing replication of the data and hastening the process of smart people finding even better general solutions for circumventing censorship.
The current situation in America really does look like 1984 already - not just the spying and media manipulation, but also the continuous fearmongering and blatant lies to justify this protracted and costly war. However I believe there really is hope for us to turn this around, and that the solution lies in leveraging the internet, encryption, and the same technologies being used now to spy on us. Let's keep finding better ways to protect information, let's keep uncovering the corruption, and let's turn this around before it's too late.
The most interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it could be founded by a hypocritical douche, but still remain a valuable repository of information.
True, but IF there is any merit to the allegation that he is misappropriating donated funds, then he has to go. Or at least some significant fiscal oversight needs to be put in place, and a responsible board of (unpaid) directors needs to take over. Otherwise, they will simply lose all support and his douchebaggery will indeed have destroyed it as a resource.
for each additional hop away you halve the bandwidth and double the latency.
I don't follow you - why couldn't remote nodes continue to pass along a chunk of information at a continuous speed? (i.e. bucket brigade).
You're supposing a half-duplex medium, but even in that case, the medium does not have to remain locked up in the local vicinity just because packets which originated there are still being propagated further down the chain. Indeed for a mesh of any appreciable size you would need to implement local CSMACD and collision recovery in some shape or form anyway, to deal with the case where two transmitters on the mesh, out of range of each other, send overlapping transmissions which eventually collide at some intermediary node.
And doubling the latency is only true _for and half duplex medium_. If you had transceivers which could transmit on one channel while receiving on another, then you could pass through the data with negligible added delay - assuming you don't store the whole packet before forwarding.
All the assumptions you've made here seem to be of a rather specific and primitive mesh technology. They are certainly not true of meshes in general. From a theoretical standpoint it is not hard to see how those limitations could be overcome with slightly more sophisticated technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Any negotiations that Yahoo's board entered into were done in bad faith and in violation of the board's obligations to the shareholders that elected it.
What obligation is that? Is the board obligated to make a deal with Microsoft? Are they obligated to engage in a good faith negotiation with them?
You'd have to show that rejecting Microsoft's unsolicited bid was not in the best interests of Yahoo's shareholders. That may seem obvious to you now, but only time will tell. If they did negotiate in bad-faith, that is an affront to Microsoft, sure... but not grounds for a shareholder action per se. Keep in mind that they were responding to an unsolicited and unwelcome bid.
If we work on the broader problem then we get better web sites for everyone, especially the disabled, without even making any particular effort for them. For example:
- A link to download a file should just go to the file, not some clever javascript crap that tells you to please wait while you're redirected, your download should start in a few moments etc.
- Quit breaking stuff up into dozens of tiny bite sized pages. My scrollbar works just fine thank you very much, and it lets me scan all of the content in an instant instead of having to click through it all. Yes, I know that some people do this to goose their ad revenue, but you see it other places too.
- Don't use clever little graphics and pop-ups for every link, text works much better.
- I don't need links to "print this page" or "email it to a friend".
- You don't need to know what region of the world I'm in before I can download a damned printer driver.
- Don't use ridiculous URLs that query stuff from a CGI with a zillion arguments just to serve up a static page.
I could go on all day... fixing any of those design problems would automatically improve accessibility, not just for blind users but for mobile devices as well.
Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible "splash pages", flash animations, and musical home pages. I'm sure in due time people will get their head around some of the other basic issues I've mentioned, but unfortunately people keep coming up with dumb new ideas much faster than that.
Second, it is HIGHLY debatable whether there is any "agreement" at all -- much less "contract" -- between Apple and a PURCHASER of its operating system from a retail provider.
You seem to be in violent agreement with me there. I already said as much in my very first post!
I think you still don't understand what I'm on about. Google "inducing breach of contract".
Yes. Duh. I am well aware of the controversy over the enforceability of EULAs, and I so qualified my statement.
I was pointing out an angle on this that everyone else had missed - that the manufacturer could be liable here even though they are not a party to the EULA.
The interesting part of this is that they have vowed to challenge Apple's EULA in court
Good luck with that! They might think they're not in violation of the EULA because they're only distributing a boxed retail copy. However, by selling someone a non-Apple machine designed to run OSX, they are guilty of intentionally interfering with their customer's contract (EULA) with Apple. I.e. they are inducing a third party to breach their contract. However you feel about EULAs, as long as the court agrees that it's enforceable this is pretty cut and dry.
This is true whether they include the boxed copy or not. It's actually even easier to show because of the included boxed copy. However, even if they didn't include it they'd probably be in even more trouble because Apple could argue that they're additionally inducing people to pirate the OS. They're just fucked!
Some of you people need to get over yourselves. You're not important enough for the government to care about.
Really? I am on the TSA's terrorist watch list. I am not allowed to use electronic check in at the airport, and I get my bags searched every time. This is not my paranoid imagination - airport personnel have explicitly told me so... but when I've called TSA they won't take me off the list and they sure as hell won't tell me how I got on it.
What have I done? Hell if I know. I'm a white non-religious male. I've bought a spur-of-the-moment one-way plane tickets. I own guns. I've spoken out on Slashdot a time or two. I've googled some weird shit. I will never know exactly how I got on that damned list, but the fact of the matter is I am getting special scrutiny from Bush's cronies and I have no fucking idea why.
Maybe YOU haven't been inconvenienced by this regime yet, because you stay home and watch TV all day. Just try exercising your freedoms and see what happens.
So this is a whole hardware server module that you stuff into a switch? Why?
A switch (or router, whatever) chassis is a ridiculously valuable piece of real estate... why would you want to spend that slot space plugging in PCs when they could just as easily be somewhere else, on the end of an ethernet cable?
Or is this intended for some highly specialized application where the linux system in tightly integrated with the host hardware in some way?
No. The law is clear - if you run a red light, you broke the law. You had the choice not to run the light.
You'd be surprised. Have you ever actually read any of your state's traffic laws? There are tons of exceptions and extenuating circumstances which can get you of the hook for most things, particularly speeding, perfectly legally. Usually it just takes a little homework.
In this case I have no doubt that if I were to go before a judge and prove that the orange light timing had been tweaked to _below the legal requirement_ that I'd have no problem getting it dismissed. I don't know the specific code off the top of my head but I'm sure I could find something. I've had tickets dismissed on much less. IANAL but I expect there is something on the books that trumps traffic code here, i.e. where the one law has been broken by the police/govt in order to force you to break another.
The ISP world has changed significantly from "many years ago"
No it hasn't - you are full of shit! Go look at some mrtg plots for other people's links.
You're not going to have "loads" of spare bandwidth if you expect to maintain any profit at all.
If your traffic is dipping at night then that is unsold capacity. The reason it is unsold is because of a bad billing model.
don't know where you get this from.
Primarily from my experience owning a small ISP many years ago, but also as predicted by common sense, and furthermore as evidenced by a quick sampling of a few publicly available bandwidth plots for some high capacity links.
As an engineer for an ISP, our low point is only from approx 2-4 am.
Right, the point is, there is less usage at night. Maybe my "ton of bandwidth" is different from yours, but unless your links are saturated during the day, I'd be surprised if your nighttime low is more than 70% of your daytime high. That means loads of bandwidth that is not being used because people pay the same charges for it regardless of time of day. Take the area between that waveform and its peak level, and that is how many bytes of usage are simply going to waste on that link. People might use it if you had a system for selling it cheaper (and as a sibling poster notes, some ISPs actually do this).
Just in case your ISP is indeed some exception, try googling mrtg index to see what it looks like for the rest of world.
What you're proposing is basically to bring that sort of thing to the Internet itself, and I can't say that I want to wait until 2AM to save on my bandwidth bill.
You have missed the point. Would you still care if your total bandwidth bill ended up being a tenth as much?
..adjust the rates based on time of day (or generally, demand at a given instant). There's a ton of spare bandwidth at night.
The interesting question is not who pays, but how can we all collectively pay less for better performance? The problem is that the billing model for the internet is broken. ISPs need to start billing for usage, that much is obvious. But in addition, I think it would be really interesting if they billed based on a function of their actual cost for delivering every individual packet. I.e. if it stays in their network it's really cheap, if it goes through a peer then it's still pretty cheap, and if it goes to a transit provider then it gets expensive. the upstream ISP could in turn bill based on their cost to deliver it. Routers could pass along this metadata about the cost, accumulating it along each hop.
Obviously this has tremendous implications in terms of the additional work that routers would need to do to account for traffic, and how the costs are communicated to the customer. However, I think the end result would be something quite incredible, because what would happen is it would drive the development of smarter P2P protocols that keep traffic nearby, and widespread deployment of caches for static content and such. Right now there is very little incentive to do these things.
The end result, once everything has had a chance to adapt, would be a phenomenally efficient internet, with reduced costs and better performance all around. ISPs wouldn't give a hoot about this new class of "smart" P2P because the bulk of the traffic would stay among their local subscribers, the bandwidth to whom is free. Massive loads would be disappear from peering centers and long distance links. The cost of bandwidth would plummet.
I think all of this is feasible, and it's worth doing.
Unlike existing open source projects, these protocols/code/APIs have never been scrutinized by independent security experts. I'll bet this reveals hundreds of new attack vectors.
This is like watching ugly people kiss.
There is a big difference between tracking tires, license plates, etc. and tracking people.
In what way is tracking a person's possessions NOT a damned effective way of tracking the person?!?!
Do complete strangers drive your car often? So you see no need for concern until a tracking device is implanted directly into your skull?
The title of the page has "t-mobile" in huge letter in magenta, as part of the words "engadget-mobile"
I could totally believe that a non-technical (ok, stupid) person might mistake this for an official t-mobile site.
branding consists of colors, words, typefaces, graphics, and this site mimics a couple of tmobile's elements. It doesn't seem to be a parody or any other such form of protected use.
I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.
But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too.
This is a good example of where the inefficient method (of about 60 moves iirc) is much faster in terms of time. The 25 move solution is elegant but just not worth it in terms of computations, time etc...
Proving that ALL cubes can be solved in 25 moves is not the same as solving A cube in 25 moves. I'd imagine if he can crunch the entire problem space of 400 billion configurations in 1500 hours, he can solve a single cube pretty damn quick.
The last version of Windows I could tolerate (and I'm being generous there) was 2000. I moved to XP for compatibility but fortunately you could easily change the look and feel to be exactly like 2000 (not like some kid barfed a stomachful of crayons across the screen).
Fortunately things have moved along and I am only depended on one or two legacy apps. I can do everything else on a Mac, and those couple of apps run fine in Parallels and I'll never have to upgrade them.
Thank goodness I can just ignore all the hoopla about Vista. "XP" should be dropped from this story's title - _Windows_ is altogether in its death throes.
Ray,
Actually I do appreciate your point, and as others have pointed out "sham" doies have a specific meaning as used here. But could you comment on the bit I quoted:
In June 2003, the RIAA publicly announced that it would begin a campaign that would involve thousands of threats and sham lawsuits against individuals.
This is clearly putting words in the defendants mouth. Unless the RIAA really referred to their own suits as "shams", I would think this comment is out of line, and discredits the plaintiff.
In June 2003, the RIAA publicly announced that it would begin a campaign that
would involve thousands of threats and sham lawsuits against individuals.
It goes on and on like this... plaintiff repeatedly referring to them as sham lawsuits, and in many cases, as above, suggesting that even the defendant acknowledged them as such.
Now don't get me wrong, I think all the lawyers representing RIAA and all principals of the record companies should be in jail (or worse). But this suit reads as inredibly amateurish to me, and if I were the judge I would get pretty irritated by being repeatedly told what to think, rather than the facts of the case.
I am hopeful that mankind can avoid ending up like in 1984, for the simple reason that the same technology that enables today's widespread spying by our government on its own citizens can also be leveraged to help us keep tabs on them. Even if they make sites like this one illegal, they will be hosted elsewhere. Furthermore, unless they figure out how to take away all of our camera cell phones, tiny solid state audio recorders, etc then we will continue to have vastly more power to document police corruption than we did just 10 years ago when you'd have to have a camcorder at hand, charged and with a tape in it, to capture anything.
I might even go so far as to say that I'd _like_ to see the government try and crack down on sites like this (and wikileaks etc), as this will only draw more attention to the problem, causing replication of the data and hastening the process of smart people finding even better general solutions for circumventing censorship.
The current situation in America really does look like 1984 already - not just the spying and media manipulation, but also the continuous fearmongering and blatant lies to justify this protracted and costly war. However I believe there really is hope for us to turn this around, and that the solution lies in leveraging the internet, encryption, and the same technologies being used now to spy on us. Let's keep finding better ways to protect information, let's keep uncovering the corruption, and let's turn this around before it's too late.
The most interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it could be founded by a hypocritical douche, but still remain a valuable repository of information.
True, but IF there is any merit to the allegation that he is misappropriating donated funds, then he has to go. Or at least some significant fiscal oversight needs to be put in place, and a responsible board of (unpaid) directors needs to take over. Otherwise, they will simply lose all support and his douchebaggery will indeed have destroyed it as a resource.
for each additional hop away you halve the bandwidth and double the latency.
I don't follow you - why couldn't remote nodes continue to pass along a chunk of information at a continuous speed? (i.e. bucket brigade).
You're supposing a half-duplex medium, but even in that case, the medium does not have to remain locked up in the local vicinity just because packets which originated there are still being propagated further down the chain. Indeed for a mesh of any appreciable size you would need to implement local CSMACD and collision recovery in some shape or form anyway, to deal with the case where two transmitters on the mesh, out of range of each other, send overlapping transmissions which eventually collide at some intermediary node.
And doubling the latency is only true _for and half duplex medium_. If you had transceivers which could transmit on one channel while receiving on another, then you could pass through the data with negligible added delay - assuming you don't store the whole packet before forwarding.
All the assumptions you've made here seem to be of a rather specific and primitive mesh technology. They are certainly not true of meshes in general. From a theoretical standpoint it is not hard to see how those limitations could be overcome with slightly more sophisticated technology.