Was that one of the monstrosities that used bundles of coax cables as interconnects? Or were those an even older series of drive?
I remember seeing a DEC system once and it used a lot of odd connectors and runs of coax between the drives and the processors...I'd never seen them before, and never since.
I am pretty sure that hard drives are not, in actuality, sealed air tight.
As evidence, if you look at most hard drives you will see small vent holes (usually easily visible because of the warnings not to cover them). I can only assume these exist to keep the pressure inside the drive case equal to the outside air pressure -- so that they don't crack or deform when taken to various altitudes, for instance.
How they accomplish this without allowing moisture in, I'm not entirely sure. Filtering dust out wouldn't be terribly hard, but the moisture would be a real issue.
Seems like a nice way to ensure that everyone buys new hard drives every few years; once they go out of warranty, they run out of lube, and consequently come to a screeching halt.
I think most people are too stupid to realize, if they had a computer running the GoogleOS, that their files weren't inside the box.
Probably the only time they'd ever have the opportunity to notice would be if they lost connectivity, and even then, a well-designed system would fallback to a local cache while wating for the online service to come back up, and then reconnect and upload the user's changes.
Lots of people send tons of personal information across untrusted networks without giving it a second thought. People use unencrypted email without considering how easy it would be for their ISP to read; same about IMs and unencrypted VoIP. Very few people ever check to make sure the little padlock is closed before they go to their bank's website to download financial data, and that's "on the internets" to them.
The truth is that people on the whole are ignorant and stupid, and until they're severely burned by an online-storage system, they'll use it in droves.
You may not want your processing power taken away, but the average computer user really doesn't care. I think that's why you're seeing longer and longer upgrade cycles on personal computers these days -- although there will be a blip when MS forces everyone to pony up in order to run Vista, most of the time, people don't care how fast their computer is, as long as it can do the stuff they want it to do.
Once you have a computer that can decode compressed HDTV and play MP3s, you've fulfilled the processor-power requirements of most normal users. Anything more than that is wasted on them, and they know it -- that's why normal people don't pay for dual-Opteron workstations right now.
Over the past few years, computer power has increased at a faster rate than consumer demand for that power has. Gone are the days when you're going to be able to get anyone but gamers or geeks to buy the latest and greatest. In time, the amount of power that most people require will (or has) become commoditized and inexpensive.
A FPS engine that can do multiplayer play can almost certainly do single player play...I don't think there's such a thing as a "multiplayer only" engine. Actually, a single-player-only one ought to be a lot simpler (if the multiplayer version already has support for bots/AIs).
I just question whether rewriting an engine from scratch is a good idea, versus putting that effort towards improving an existing engine. If the Quake II engine is insufficent today, update/fix it. It's very hard to believe that writing a completely new one is easier than that, unless there is some vast architectural difference between the way they're designing the engine today and the way QII was designed, and I've seen no evidence of that so far.
The articles are both very light on technical details, and somewhat vague as to what's really going on. (Admittedly, maybe they don't know it.) In the first article, they allude to the problems being the result of the "softmodem"-like RAID systems that modern integrated motherboards use, which would remove some of the blame from the processor. But then they also suggest that the same problem occurs with dedicated RAID controllers (IBM ServeRAIDs -- I think these are dedicated controllers), which don't cause too much CPU load at all... further implicating the mobo. However, similar mobos with AMD processors didn't experience the problem, so there's obviously something going on that's Intel's fault.
It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to pin the blame down to the particular component: is it the integrated RAID subsystem utilizing the processor inefficiently? Or is it the processor itself, being slow? And if it was the processor, why wouldn't this slowness be exhibited in other situations?
Seems to me that what needs to happen, is for somebody to do a test with a Conroe processor in a motherboard that doesn't include any of the integrated, offload-work-to-the-processor type of integrated subsystems (RAID, sound, Ethernet), use a 'real' hardware RAID controller, and see what the results are. If there are still problems in that scenario, then there would seem to be something wrong with the processor, and this could be confirmed with simulative benchmarks.
As a criticism of Intel's complete "systems" (processor plus chipset) I suppose this is a valid criticism, but I'd like to see more of a breakdown as to where the performance hit is coming from.
So... if the Quake engine has been released under the GPL, why does this project exist?
Why not build on and improve Quake II's engine, instead of just reinventing the wheel (3d engine) all over again? Does the world really need another engine, when there's a perfectly good FPS one available that's both free and a lot more mature?
I don't get it.
If it's just a for-the-hell-of-it project, that's fine, but the summary makes it sound like it's somehow creating something new, as if an open source FPS doesn't already exist. It does.
Actually if you look on the site's about page, where he has a wish/priority list, CueCat support is on there.
Unfortunately, it seems like he doesn't have a CueCat, and he's looking for someone to donate one, plus postage to Denmark.
I only have one, but maybe someone around on Slashdot who cleaned up (the last time these came up in discussion, it seemed like there were people around with dozens of the things) as they were going out of business will be willing to post one to Europe.
There are several GPLed projects which have CueCat support in them already -- Alexandria, which is a book-cataloging program, does it (although I've never gotten a chance to play with it that much) and there are some standalone scripts and libraries for decoding CueCat output around, from when they were more popular. Doesn't seem like it would be particularly hard to do.
I think what makes the "free" offers of music less attractive is that they're not really free.
It's more like borrowing music, while you happen to be there at University. It's only "free music" in the same way that the University's collection of CDs in the Audio Dept of the library is "free music;" and only then if you don't rip their CDs. It's just something you can borrow when you're a student there, and stops working when you leave.
If you want to really own the music, you have to pay for it -- thus it's not really a free service.
So if you actually want to own music, P2P or just swapping files still comes out way ahead -- the time-limited 'rental' services don't hold a candle to it, either in terms of selection or ownership or in what you can do with the resulting files (iPod compatibility).
That anybody is using these services at all is pretty miraculous, given how much they suck.
Furthermore, if I was a student at any one of these schools, I'd be fairly annoyed that my tuition dollars were being used to provide me with such a thing. Any of these "free" services are almost certainly only free in the most ignorant use of the word -- free in that the cost of the service is rolled into my tuition, so that the student doesn't have an option to buy it or not. That, to me, seems highly obnoxious. Uni was expensive enough when I was there (and more expensive now); the last thing it needs is some DRM-crazy music rental service that few people will use being rolled into its cost.
So you agree that there aren't any real arguments against allowing.xxx and that everybody is actually engaging in a slippery-slope argument?
I certainly do not agree. I think that creating a new TLD without suffient compelling reason for its existence is a bad thing. Outside of a good reason why it should exist, I am against creating new ones. This goes for.xxx,.mobi, etc.
(The.mobi thing in particular is stupid, and nothing but a money-grab by the registrars, since it's just as easy to standardize on using "mobi" as a prefix instead of a TLD: e.g., the mobile version of the Coke website is mobi.coke.com; it's a simple matter to have mobile devices check for a "mobi." site anytime an address is entered, before pulling up the regular version if it doesn't exist.)
Also, your outright rejection of an argument because you call it a "slippery slope" is naive. If doing x makes y more likely to occur, and y is something bad, then it might be a bad idea to do x. There are many valid 'slippery slope' arguments, and they're valid when the first action makes subsequent undesirable actions more likely to occur. In short: an outright rejection of anything that looks like a slippery slope argument without considering it is as uninsightful as an outright rejection of all actions because of specious slippery slope concerns.
Virtually nobody whose ultimate goal is filtering porn is interested in purely optional use of.xxx or.sex. It would have no value: if you can't guarantee that all porn will be contained within that TLD, then you still have to maintain the same sort of white or blacklists as today. The benefit at all, if there is one, is very small to those doing the filtering. At best, it would reduce the size of their blacklist databases by a few hundred K -- and probably not even that: most existing porn sites would just dual-register (and I find it hard to believe in the extreme that most new ones wouldn't as well, just on the off chance that they'd pick up some business from the occasional person in an ".xxx blocked" area who had access to a credit card, or just from name recognition). The result would probably be a dramatic increase in the total number of URLs which led to porn: just as many in the existing TLDs, plus the entirety of the new.xxx or.sex TLD.
Since this outcome -- an increase in the apparent number of porn sites (porn URLs, anyway) is inconsistent with the goals of virtually everyone trying to limit access to porn, it stands to reason that the purely optional use of.xxx cannot be their ultimate goal.
Which brings me to my other point: if.xxx were created, and if it was even mentioned to the public that the purpose of it was to limit access to porn, it is quite easy to imagine that after its voluntary use is an abject failure, that there develops sufficent political pressure in some countries to make its use mandatory. This isn't some tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory: it's utterly believable and totally within the realm of contemporary U.S. politics.
Since I think that the mandatory position of.xxx would be a disaster, and this disaster can only occur if.xxx exists (and conversely, it cannot occur if.xxx is never created), it's a no-brainer that creating it is a bad idea.
Absent any compelling reasons why creating.xxx is a good idea, and given that there are a substantial number of very well-placed concerns with the 'ghettoization' of the Internet, I think we have been absolutely correct thus far to reject all "porn" TLDs.
Um, if the US telcos start deprioritizing Skype packets, it will make a very large difference to their business, a large part of which is in the US, and that will have an effect on their stock price in Europe.
Being outside US jurisdiction stops Skype, Inc. (or whatever its legal embodiment is called) from being sued or otherwise attacked directly, but that doesn't mean that they can just blithely ignore whatever goes on in one of the worlds largest markets.
The demise of network neutrality -- if it happens, which right now looks pretty likely -- could easily lead to an escalating cat-and-mouse game between the networks looking to deprioritize competitors' packets, and those competitors, looking to keep their services even with the telcos' "preferred" services, by masquerading as them, or as unrelated traffic.
It's like talking to a gambler who was up $10,000 before losing their shirts at roulette.
If you gave them the opportunity to "do it all again," what do you think they're going to do? The 'right' thing -- don't start gambling in the first place? Hell no! They're going to try to get out one round earlier, when they were up!
I fully expect that if someone like Lay had the chance to play life's game over, that he wouldn't do that much differently -- he'd just have gotten out of Enron a few months or years earlier, and retired to Aspen as a multi-millionaire instead of saying in and hoping to be a billionaire.
The essential mistake still remains, it's just that people try to play the game a little bit better, rather than just not playing at all.
The reason people are against 'allowing'.xxx is because they realize that nobody just wants to allow it. Anyone who wants to regulate "smut," who are the main proponents of.xxx and similar schemes, must necessarily eventually want to make its use required by all porn sites, since without this requirement it has no value.
(Obligatory Godwin's-law-violating analogy: it's like somebody arguing that there's no problem in just building a concentration camp, since they're never going to require that anyone actually go there. Sometimes you should look at what's being created, regardless of what the people creating it are saying. If the two don't match: actions speak louder than words.)
Without a legal requirement that porn couldn't be in the regular TLDs,.xxx is just an additional advertising vehicle for pornography and a revenue source for the registrars.
If.xxx were created, it would only be a matter of time before its use was mandated (or attempted to be). It's just too tempting. You get an election year, and some politicians decide they can rile up their base by putting all the porn 'where it belongs.' Sure, it would be stupid; sure, it could never work -- but the adverse effect it could have on free speech would be enormous.
Thus -- because creating.xxx would serve only to tempt idiot politicans (see the article on the Hon. Senator from Alaska) into making its use mandatory -- it is a Pandora's Box better left unopened.
There are also a host of other valid reasons, aside from the political ones, why creating additional TLDs is a bad idea. Anytime you create a new one, you force anyone with a recognizable brand name to buy from it (in order to protect their brand -- e.g., Coke would almost certainly have to immeditately buy coke.mobi and coca-cola.mobi, if such a thing was instituted). The W3C Technical Architecture Group agrees: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD; not to mention RFC 3675:.sex Considered Dangerous.
He's referring to the old adage about a 'pot calling the kettle black.' I.e., accusing someone of something while being simultaneously guilty of it yourself.
There are very few business models that can compete with an entrenched, unrestrained monopoly.
It's not really fair to judge a business model when that's what you're putting it up against. That's like saying that a machine gun is inferior to a flintlock musket, if you make the start condition one where the musket is pressed to the head of the machine gunner -- it doesn't have to be superior in order to win, it just has to barely work.
Any business model that can even keep itself alive when in direct competition with a firm as aggressive as Microsoft would probably do very well in an actual free market.
I don't quite get the point of your comment. Your tone is negative, but everything that you say seems to agree with the post you (I think) were responding to.
Copyright is granted by governments to legal entities (individuals and corporations); thus, what is granted can also be taken away. It's a grant, not an inalienable right.
Although I don't think the E.U. has the cojones to actually do it, it wouldn't be totally outside their power (well, it might be -- I don't know whether the E.U. handles copyrights -- but as a government, fundamentally they wouldn't be) to strip an entity which didn't comply with its laws, of some of the protections afforded to compliant entities.
If they were really afraid of being noncompliant, they could probably just release the source for the various implementations in lieu of specifications, and I'm sure lots of other people would be happy to comb through the source and do the "impossible" work for them.
Microsoft has only set it self an impossible task because its business model requires it to ride a razor's edge between giving out too much information (and giving up the home-court advantage that Microsoft's internal developers enjoy) and not enough (and facing the ire of the regulators).
As other people have pointed out, they have working implementations of everything they're trying to document -- if writing the specs is proving too hard, I'm sure the E.U. would be satisfied with the actual source.
Too bad that's even less palatable to them than the fines are.
I don't believe in making a speeding ticket relative to one's income, because the danger caused by a rich person speeding isn't any greater than a poor person speeding -- either way, they're still causing as much danger to the people around them. (I would, however, be OK making the fine proportional to the curb weight of your vehicle, say $1 per pound/kilo, but that's another story.)
When Microsoft does something anti-consumer, because they are so big, the damage is much greater than if Joe Blow's Pretty Good Computers does the same thing. Thus, the fine should be higher.
The fine should depend entirely on the 'crime' being punished; however, sometimes the measure of the crime requires the size of the perpetrator to be taken into account.
How many people do you think there are -- actual key decisionmakers -- in the E.U. hierarchy that came up with this fine? I don't mean necessarily everyone that has a vote, I just mean the people that are really pulling the strings; people with political capital to spend on this issue.
I don't know how many there are, but I suspect there are few enough of them so that Microsoft could easily -- if the situation came down to it -- buy them all nice chateaus in the Alps and pull the rug out from under this whole business, and come out ahead, financially.
Everybody has a price. When we're talking about billions of dollars, I'd start to look seriously at the financies of anyone who has a sudden change of heart on this issue in the next few months.
Just remember: there are really no laws and no legal framework when you start dealing with multinational corporations -- they're akin to governments. There are just more or less adverse outcomes. Whatever is most profitable and least risky is what they will do. Laws are just statements of risk. Break one, and you might lose money, somehow -- but if the benefit from breaking it times the odds of getting caught is greater than the penalty times the odds, you go ahead and break it anyway.
Although I'm generally not a fan of "Robin Hood"-esque solutions, perhaps the way to go is to fine Microsoft, and use the money from the fines in order to develop a diverse range of competition to them and their products.
That is the ultimate goal -- a free market not dominated by a single entity -- so it would make sense to use the money provided by fining noncompliant corporations (MS or others) to finance things that move us closer to that goal.
I see a number of ways that could be accomplished with regards to OS software, that doesn't include just making handouts to other companies (which, I believe, ultimately makes them less competitive in the long run, since they become lazy and dependent on the handouts). You could use the money to acquire patents that could be used anticompetitively and give free use of them to those who agree not to use theirs aggressively (a la IBM), fund software research -- the output of which would be in the public domain, or give grants directly to individual developers working to make products which allow end-users to be less dependent on Microsoft (this one is tricky, and would require that they release the software under a suitable license, or perhaps public domain). And of course, there's always lots of user education to be done.
Obviously, it does very little good to simply fine Microsoft and then have the money be absorbed into the coffers of Brussels, Washington, or any of the EU regional governments. In order for the move to be anything but punitive (and it's orders of magnitude too small to have any effect purely as a 'stick' and not a 'carrot'), the money needs to be used in ways that weaken the monopoly's hold on the public, rather than simply reprimanding it and allowing the status quo to continue.
Interesting. I wasn't sure (although I suspected) how deeply MS-DOS and it's derivatives/clones was tied to x86. I suppose that the DOSses for other architectures are similarly tied at a low level (e.g., Apple's ProDOS for the II series, AmigaDOS, etc.).
I think the ContikiOS mentioned in the response below is probably as close as anyone is going to get to a lighter-than-Linux "universal DOS."
I've always wondered that about recumbents. I've never ridden in one, but just envisioning how it would feel, it seems like it would be harder to go up a hill in one.
I think it'd be neat if they did a separate race class for recumbent bikes -- or instead of defining the class as 'recumbents,' just make it an Open class. Allow anything in that rides on two wheels and is powered entirely by the rider's muscles.
Although I am not in any way defaming pure athletic competition, I think that there is a lot of technological development that is stymied by race regulations, both in the bicycling, automotive, and other (yachts, etc.) fields. In each of these categories, I'd like to see an Open or Unrestricted class that let people compete on the basis of technological innovations, in addition to athleticism and skill. Frankly, as a society, I think we'd probably get more out of that than we do just from watching a particularly well-built specimen of a human, which while inspriring to watch, is not easily replicated.
I haven't figured out how to get my employer to get me a Leap, but if I could, I'd gladly trade my Aeron in for one. It just seems much more soldily built.
The Aeron is nice because it's made out of mesh, but it's a fairly cheap plastic chair in other respects, IMO. I feel like if I'm really rough on it, it'll break. Not like a $30 piece-of-crap from Staples perhaps, but it doesn't feel like the sort of thing that's going to last a few decades either.
Contrast that to the Steelcase chair I have in my home office. It's at least 20 years old and still rolls and tilts like the day it was new. If their new stuff is as solid as their stuff was 20 years ago, it's a damn good investment.
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Was that one of the monstrosities that used bundles of coax cables as interconnects? Or were those an even older series of drive?
I remember seeing a DEC system once and it used a lot of odd connectors and runs of coax between the drives and the processors...I'd never seen them before, and never since.
I am pretty sure that hard drives are not, in actuality, sealed air tight.
As evidence, if you look at most hard drives you will see small vent holes (usually easily visible because of the warnings not to cover them). I can only assume these exist to keep the pressure inside the drive case equal to the outside air pressure -- so that they don't crack or deform when taken to various altitudes, for instance.
How they accomplish this without allowing moisture in, I'm not entirely sure. Filtering dust out wouldn't be terribly hard, but the moisture would be a real issue.
Seems like a nice way to ensure that everyone buys new hard drives every few years; once they go out of warranty, they run out of lube, and consequently come to a screeching halt.
King Gillette would be proud.
I think most people are too stupid to realize, if they had a computer running the GoogleOS, that their files weren't inside the box.
Probably the only time they'd ever have the opportunity to notice would be if they lost connectivity, and even then, a well-designed system would fallback to a local cache while wating for the online service to come back up, and then reconnect and upload the user's changes.
Lots of people send tons of personal information across untrusted networks without giving it a second thought. People use unencrypted email without considering how easy it would be for their ISP to read; same about IMs and unencrypted VoIP. Very few people ever check to make sure the little padlock is closed before they go to their bank's website to download financial data, and that's "on the internets" to them.
The truth is that people on the whole are ignorant and stupid, and until they're severely burned by an online-storage system, they'll use it in droves.
You may not want your processing power taken away, but the average computer user really doesn't care. I think that's why you're seeing longer and longer upgrade cycles on personal computers these days -- although there will be a blip when MS forces everyone to pony up in order to run Vista, most of the time, people don't care how fast their computer is, as long as it can do the stuff they want it to do.
Once you have a computer that can decode compressed HDTV and play MP3s, you've fulfilled the processor-power requirements of most normal users. Anything more than that is wasted on them, and they know it -- that's why normal people don't pay for dual-Opteron workstations right now.
Over the past few years, computer power has increased at a faster rate than consumer demand for that power has. Gone are the days when you're going to be able to get anyone but gamers or geeks to buy the latest and greatest. In time, the amount of power that most people require will (or has) become commoditized and inexpensive.
A FPS engine that can do multiplayer play can almost certainly do single player play...I don't think there's such a thing as a "multiplayer only" engine. Actually, a single-player-only one ought to be a lot simpler (if the multiplayer version already has support for bots/AIs).
I just question whether rewriting an engine from scratch is a good idea, versus putting that effort towards improving an existing engine. If the Quake II engine is insufficent today, update/fix it. It's very hard to believe that writing a completely new one is easier than that, unless there is some vast architectural difference between the way they're designing the engine today and the way QII was designed, and I've seen no evidence of that so far.
I'm slightly confused.
... further implicating the mobo. However, similar mobos with AMD processors didn't experience the problem, so there's obviously something going on that's Intel's fault.
The articles are both very light on technical details, and somewhat vague as to what's really going on. (Admittedly, maybe they don't know it.) In the first article, they allude to the problems being the result of the "softmodem"-like RAID systems that modern integrated motherboards use, which would remove some of the blame from the processor. But then they also suggest that the same problem occurs with dedicated RAID controllers (IBM ServeRAIDs -- I think these are dedicated controllers), which don't cause too much CPU load at all
It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to pin the blame down to the particular component: is it the integrated RAID subsystem utilizing the processor inefficiently? Or is it the processor itself, being slow? And if it was the processor, why wouldn't this slowness be exhibited in other situations?
Seems to me that what needs to happen, is for somebody to do a test with a Conroe processor in a motherboard that doesn't include any of the integrated, offload-work-to-the-processor type of integrated subsystems (RAID, sound, Ethernet), use a 'real' hardware RAID controller, and see what the results are. If there are still problems in that scenario, then there would seem to be something wrong with the processor, and this could be confirmed with simulative benchmarks.
As a criticism of Intel's complete "systems" (processor plus chipset) I suppose this is a valid criticism, but I'd like to see more of a breakdown as to where the performance hit is coming from.
So ... if the Quake engine has been released under the GPL, why does this project exist?
Why not build on and improve Quake II's engine, instead of just reinventing the wheel (3d engine) all over again? Does the world really need another engine, when there's a perfectly good FPS one available that's both free and a lot more mature?
I don't get it.
If it's just a for-the-hell-of-it project, that's fine, but the summary makes it sound like it's somehow creating something new, as if an open source FPS doesn't already exist. It does.
Actually if you look on the site's about page, where he has a wish/priority list, CueCat support is on there.
Unfortunately, it seems like he doesn't have a CueCat, and he's looking for someone to donate one, plus postage to Denmark.
I only have one, but maybe someone around on Slashdot who cleaned up (the last time these came up in discussion, it seemed like there were people around with dozens of the things) as they were going out of business will be willing to post one to Europe.
There are several GPLed projects which have CueCat support in them already -- Alexandria, which is a book-cataloging program, does it (although I've never gotten a chance to play with it that much) and there are some standalone scripts and libraries for decoding CueCat output around, from when they were more popular. Doesn't seem like it would be particularly hard to do.
I think what makes the "free" offers of music less attractive is that they're not really free.
It's more like borrowing music, while you happen to be there at University. It's only "free music" in the same way that the University's collection of CDs in the Audio Dept of the library is "free music;" and only then if you don't rip their CDs. It's just something you can borrow when you're a student there, and stops working when you leave.
If you want to really own the music, you have to pay for it -- thus it's not really a free service.
So if you actually want to own music, P2P or just swapping files still comes out way ahead -- the time-limited 'rental' services don't hold a candle to it, either in terms of selection or ownership or in what you can do with the resulting files (iPod compatibility).
That anybody is using these services at all is pretty miraculous, given how much they suck.
Furthermore, if I was a student at any one of these schools, I'd be fairly annoyed that my tuition dollars were being used to provide me with such a thing. Any of these "free" services are almost certainly only free in the most ignorant use of the word -- free in that the cost of the service is rolled into my tuition, so that the student doesn't have an option to buy it or not. That, to me, seems highly obnoxious. Uni was expensive enough when I was there (and more expensive now); the last thing it needs is some DRM-crazy music rental service that few people will use being rolled into its cost.
So you agree that there aren't any real arguments against allowing .xxx and that everybody is actually engaging in a slippery-slope argument?
.xxx, .mobi, etc.
.mobi thing in particular is stupid, and nothing but a money-grab by the registrars, since it's just as easy to standardize on using "mobi" as a prefix instead of a TLD: e.g., the mobile version of the Coke website is mobi.coke.com; it's a simple matter to have mobile devices check for a "mobi." site anytime an address is entered, before pulling up the regular version if it doesn't exist.)
.xxx or .sex. It would have no value: if you can't guarantee that all porn will be contained within that TLD, then you still have to maintain the same sort of white or blacklists as today. The benefit at all, if there is one, is very small to those doing the filtering. At best, it would reduce the size of their blacklist databases by a few hundred K -- and probably not even that: most existing porn sites would just dual-register (and I find it hard to believe in the extreme that most new ones wouldn't as well, just on the off chance that they'd pick up some business from the occasional person in an ".xxx blocked" area who had access to a credit card, or just from name recognition). The result would probably be a dramatic increase in the total number of URLs which led to porn: just as many in the existing TLDs, plus the entirety of the new .xxx or .sex TLD.
.xxx cannot be their ultimate goal.
.xxx were created, and if it was even mentioned to the public that the purpose of it was to limit access to porn, it is quite easy to imagine that after its voluntary use is an abject failure, that there develops sufficent political pressure in some countries to make its use mandatory. This isn't some tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory: it's utterly believable and totally within the realm of contemporary U.S. politics.
.xxx would be a disaster, and this disaster can only occur if .xxx exists (and conversely, it cannot occur if .xxx is never created), it's a no-brainer that creating it is a bad idea.
.xxx is a good idea, and given that there are a substantial number of very well-placed concerns with the 'ghettoization' of the Internet, I think we have been absolutely correct thus far to reject all "porn" TLDs.
I certainly do not agree. I think that creating a new TLD without suffient compelling reason for its existence is a bad thing. Outside of a good reason why it should exist, I am against creating new ones. This goes for
(The
Also, your outright rejection of an argument because you call it a "slippery slope" is naive. If doing x makes y more likely to occur, and y is something bad, then it might be a bad idea to do x. There are many valid 'slippery slope' arguments, and they're valid when the first action makes subsequent undesirable actions more likely to occur. In short: an outright rejection of anything that looks like a slippery slope argument without considering it is as uninsightful as an outright rejection of all actions because of specious slippery slope concerns.
Virtually nobody whose ultimate goal is filtering porn is interested in purely optional use of
Since this outcome -- an increase in the apparent number of porn sites (porn URLs, anyway) is inconsistent with the goals of virtually everyone trying to limit access to porn, it stands to reason that the purely optional use of
Which brings me to my other point: if
Since I think that the mandatory position of
Absent any compelling reasons why creating
Um, if the US telcos start deprioritizing Skype packets, it will make a very large difference to their business, a large part of which is in the US, and that will have an effect on their stock price in Europe.
Being outside US jurisdiction stops Skype, Inc. (or whatever its legal embodiment is called) from being sued or otherwise attacked directly, but that doesn't mean that they can just blithely ignore whatever goes on in one of the worlds largest markets.
The demise of network neutrality -- if it happens, which right now looks pretty likely -- could easily lead to an escalating cat-and-mouse game between the networks looking to deprioritize competitors' packets, and those competitors, looking to keep their services even with the telcos' "preferred" services, by masquerading as them, or as unrelated traffic.
Agreed.
It's like talking to a gambler who was up $10,000 before losing their shirts at roulette.
If you gave them the opportunity to "do it all again," what do you think they're going to do? The 'right' thing -- don't start gambling in the first place? Hell no! They're going to try to get out one round earlier, when they were up!
I fully expect that if someone like Lay had the chance to play life's game over, that he wouldn't do that much differently -- he'd just have gotten out of Enron a few months or years earlier, and retired to Aspen as a multi-millionaire instead of saying in and hoping to be a billionaire.
The essential mistake still remains, it's just that people try to play the game a little bit better, rather than just not playing at all.
The reason people are against 'allowing' .xxx is because they realize that nobody just wants to allow it. Anyone who wants to regulate "smut," who are the main proponents of .xxx and similar schemes, must necessarily eventually want to make its use required by all porn sites, since without this requirement it has no value.
.xxx is just an additional advertising vehicle for pornography and a revenue source for the registrars.
.xxx were created, it would only be a matter of time before its use was mandated (or attempted to be). It's just too tempting. You get an election year, and some politicians decide they can rile up their base by putting all the porn 'where it belongs.' Sure, it would be stupid; sure, it could never work -- but the adverse effect it could have on free speech would be enormous.
.xxx would serve only to tempt idiot politicans (see the article on the Hon. Senator from Alaska) into making its use mandatory -- it is a Pandora's Box better left unopened.
.sex Considered Dangerous.
(Obligatory Godwin's-law-violating analogy: it's like somebody arguing that there's no problem in just building a concentration camp, since they're never going to require that anyone actually go there. Sometimes you should look at what's being created, regardless of what the people creating it are saying. If the two don't match: actions speak louder than words.)
Without a legal requirement that porn couldn't be in the regular TLDs,
If
Thus -- because creating
There are also a host of other valid reasons, aside from the political ones, why creating additional TLDs is a bad idea. Anytime you create a new one, you force anyone with a recognizable brand name to buy from it (in order to protect their brand -- e.g., Coke would almost certainly have to immeditately buy coke.mobi and coca-cola.mobi, if such a thing was instituted). The W3C Technical Architecture Group agrees: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD; not to mention RFC 3675:
He's referring to the old adage about a 'pot calling the kettle black.' I.e., accusing someone of something while being simultaneously guilty of it yourself.
Not for me. I'm seeing the text directly against the blue "graph paper" background image; there's no white 'paper' underneath the text.
This is using Firefox 1.0.7 on my work machine (WinXP) with Adblock and Filterset.G. Not sure how it looks on Konqueror/Safari.
There are very few business models that can compete with an entrenched, unrestrained monopoly.
It's not really fair to judge a business model when that's what you're putting it up against. That's like saying that a machine gun is inferior to a flintlock musket, if you make the start condition one where the musket is pressed to the head of the machine gunner -- it doesn't have to be superior in order to win, it just has to barely work.
Any business model that can even keep itself alive when in direct competition with a firm as aggressive as Microsoft would probably do very well in an actual free market.
I don't quite get the point of your comment. Your tone is negative, but everything that you say seems to agree with the post you (I think) were responding to.
Copyright is granted by governments to legal entities (individuals and corporations); thus, what is granted can also be taken away. It's a grant, not an inalienable right.
Although I don't think the E.U. has the cojones to actually do it, it wouldn't be totally outside their power (well, it might be -- I don't know whether the E.U. handles copyrights -- but as a government, fundamentally they wouldn't be) to strip an entity which didn't comply with its laws, of some of the protections afforded to compliant entities.
If they were really afraid of being noncompliant, they could probably just release the source for the various implementations in lieu of specifications, and I'm sure lots of other people would be happy to comb through the source and do the "impossible" work for them.
Microsoft has only set it self an impossible task because its business model requires it to ride a razor's edge between giving out too much information (and giving up the home-court advantage that Microsoft's internal developers enjoy) and not enough (and facing the ire of the regulators).
As other people have pointed out, they have working implementations of everything they're trying to document -- if writing the specs is proving too hard, I'm sure the E.U. would be satisfied with the actual source.
Too bad that's even less palatable to them than the fines are.
Well said.
I don't believe in making a speeding ticket relative to one's income, because the danger caused by a rich person speeding isn't any greater than a poor person speeding -- either way, they're still causing as much danger to the people around them. (I would, however, be OK making the fine proportional to the curb weight of your vehicle, say $1 per pound/kilo, but that's another story.)
When Microsoft does something anti-consumer, because they are so big, the damage is much greater than if Joe Blow's Pretty Good Computers does the same thing. Thus, the fine should be higher.
The fine should depend entirely on the 'crime' being punished; however, sometimes the measure of the crime requires the size of the perpetrator to be taken into account.
How many people do you think there are -- actual key decisionmakers -- in the E.U. hierarchy that came up with this fine? I don't mean necessarily everyone that has a vote, I just mean the people that are really pulling the strings; people with political capital to spend on this issue.
I don't know how many there are, but I suspect there are few enough of them so that Microsoft could easily -- if the situation came down to it -- buy them all nice chateaus in the Alps and pull the rug out from under this whole business, and come out ahead, financially.
Everybody has a price. When we're talking about billions of dollars, I'd start to look seriously at the financies of anyone who has a sudden change of heart on this issue in the next few months.
Just remember: there are really no laws and no legal framework when you start dealing with multinational corporations -- they're akin to governments. There are just more or less adverse outcomes. Whatever is most profitable and least risky is what they will do. Laws are just statements of risk. Break one, and you might lose money, somehow -- but if the benefit from breaking it times the odds of getting caught is greater than the penalty times the odds, you go ahead and break it anyway.
Although I'm generally not a fan of "Robin Hood"-esque solutions, perhaps the way to go is to fine Microsoft, and use the money from the fines in order to develop a diverse range of competition to them and their products.
That is the ultimate goal -- a free market not dominated by a single entity -- so it would make sense to use the money provided by fining noncompliant corporations (MS or others) to finance things that move us closer to that goal.
I see a number of ways that could be accomplished with regards to OS software, that doesn't include just making handouts to other companies (which, I believe, ultimately makes them less competitive in the long run, since they become lazy and dependent on the handouts). You could use the money to acquire patents that could be used anticompetitively and give free use of them to those who agree not to use theirs aggressively (a la IBM), fund software research -- the output of which would be in the public domain, or give grants directly to individual developers working to make products which allow end-users to be less dependent on Microsoft (this one is tricky, and would require that they release the software under a suitable license, or perhaps public domain). And of course, there's always lots of user education to be done.
Obviously, it does very little good to simply fine Microsoft and then have the money be absorbed into the coffers of Brussels, Washington, or any of the EU regional governments. In order for the move to be anything but punitive (and it's orders of magnitude too small to have any effect purely as a 'stick' and not a 'carrot'), the money needs to be used in ways that weaken the monopoly's hold on the public, rather than simply reprimanding it and allowing the status quo to continue.
Interesting. I wasn't sure (although I suspected) how deeply MS-DOS and it's derivatives/clones was tied to x86. I suppose that the DOSses for other architectures are similarly tied at a low level (e.g., Apple's ProDOS for the II series, AmigaDOS, etc.).
I think the ContikiOS mentioned in the response below is probably as close as anyone is going to get to a lighter-than-Linux "universal DOS."
I've always wondered that about recumbents. I've never ridden in one, but just envisioning how it would feel, it seems like it would be harder to go up a hill in one.
I think it'd be neat if they did a separate race class for recumbent bikes -- or instead of defining the class as 'recumbents,' just make it an Open class. Allow anything in that rides on two wheels and is powered entirely by the rider's muscles.
Although I am not in any way defaming pure athletic competition, I think that there is a lot of technological development that is stymied by race regulations, both in the bicycling, automotive, and other (yachts, etc.) fields. In each of these categories, I'd like to see an Open or Unrestricted class that let people compete on the basis of technological innovations, in addition to athleticism and skill. Frankly, as a society, I think we'd probably get more out of that than we do just from watching a particularly well-built specimen of a human, which while inspriring to watch, is not easily replicated.
I haven't figured out how to get my employer to get me a Leap, but if I could, I'd gladly trade my Aeron in for one. It just seems much more soldily built.
The Aeron is nice because it's made out of mesh, but it's a fairly cheap plastic chair in other respects, IMO. I feel like if I'm really rough on it, it'll break. Not like a $30 piece-of-crap from Staples perhaps, but it doesn't feel like the sort of thing that's going to last a few decades either.
Contrast that to the Steelcase chair I have in my home office. It's at least 20 years old and still rolls and tilts like the day it was new. If their new stuff is as solid as their stuff was 20 years ago, it's a damn good investment.