The problem is twofold: First, many people simply don't have money, or don't have disposable money to pay on software, and second, the license agreement is just too easy to break.
Now, I personally think MS Office is good software. And a lot of it -- I'd gladly pay Microsoft $80 for it (if I had $80 which I don't.) How much does Office run these days, $400? ($488.22 from CompUSA, just checked.) So what do I do with my $80?
You can't possibly believe that MS Office is worth nearly $500, or if you do, I've got an assload of software I'll sell you at those inflated prices.
Now, if I were to pirate MS Office, then your argument that Microsoft loses money vanishes into thin air. I wouldn't buy it at $500, no matter what, so they're not losing money. Hell, I'd be glad to give them $80, and I bet that would cover all their development costs. Seen in that sense, piracy is not theft, since nobody loses anything.
The second part of the problem is that it's just too easy to pirate. This goes especially for shareware, getting back to the original post. Free download, free use, after 30 days it starts beeping at me. Big whoop, I can put up with that, it's a hell of a lot easier than cracking Office.
This is where GNU-style or BSD-style free software gets its kick: It's much harder to break the license.
Let's be honest, very few people read or care about the GPL any more than they do Microsoft's EULA. The difference is that it's much harder to break the GPL, since the things that people will do with software in the course of using it (use it, share it, customize it) are allowed by the GPL. Microsoft could learn a lesson.
So this shareware outfit is sick of people "ripping them off"? Then take these two factors into account: First, is it priced right? I'd like to reiterate to any Microsoft types who might be listening: I think Office is well worth $80, and I'd pay $80 for it. That's $80 more than you're getting off me now. The same applies for this shareware thing. I've seen simple shareware that wants $40, and is obviously worth $5. Who wants to guess whether I paid for that?
Also, make sure your license agreement doesn't get in the way of normal use. Allow people to freely copy and play with and whatever.
Thirdly, rather than a MS-like product activation process, you may want to consider Valve's World ONline system, which I think is the best solution yet. Every license carries with it a WONid. The software is freely downloadable, and you can have as many copies as you like. The catch is that on startup it transmits your WONid to a server, which kicks you if your WONid is already in use. (I assume -- I've never been kicked, but then I don't give out my WONid.) The result is that you pay for use, rather than for software.
It's not a typo. Just because it's more secure doesn't mean people percieve it as more secure. And perception is far more important than fact in this instance. It also doesn't mean it's "secure" in the sense that anyone who know how dangerous it was would do it. Yet, people hand their credit cards to waiters and waitresses all the time...
The main problems of online retailing are, first, it's online, and second, it's retail.
The first means that it's inherently insecure. Oh shut up about encryption, I used to work for one of these places, I know how insecure it is. Fact is it's more secure than handing your credit card to a waiter, but it's still pretty close to nil. It also means you'll have to pay for shipping and wait 3 days to get your thing. Impulse buying is out the door then, and most retailers will tell you that's where the bulk of their profit is.
The second factor is that it's retail, which is historically a low margin industry. Plus, in order to make people change their buying habits, the online retailers need to undercut offline competitors prices, not just by a little, but by a LOT, because they need to offset shipping as well.
What this comes out to is: The biggest profit to be made from online retail is in shipping. UPS and FedEx stand to make a mint off online retail, while the online retailers are stuck with low margins and high priced security consultants to assuage the public's fears.
Which is not to say that there's no money to be made in online retail, just that it's not the mountains of dollars that Jeff Bezos says.
Not just Universities either. The UK does it to recruit spooks.
The theory is sound: If you want good people, don't ask them to write a self-aggrandizing paper, set them a real-world, if trivial, challenge. The world is open-book, so the reward (job scholarship admission whatnot) goes to the person who can find the answer by whatever means.
Unrelated, but follows: A reference librarian is oftentimes better to have than a genius.
Re:the kernel? my god man
on
Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 3, Insightful
" Theres a core group in charge of what goes and what stays."
Actually, in Linux it's the same (f.e. Torvalds, Cox, Tosatti).
This is true of the kernel, but the kernel is not the whole deal. One of the major problems with Linux is *that* it's every yahoo for himself -- Cox and Torvalds and a few others do the kernel, the glibc people are a different bunch, the X consortium, the ISC, Apache Foundation, plus all those assorted little libraries, you know the type, it's a kinda neat library, but you've only found 1 app that needs it... Everyone does their own thing and contributes it to the slushpot, but nobody controls the pot.
So, where the BSD team is some 10-20 people who can all get in a room and hash out details and come out with a coherent ports system, or a standard place to put software (apache goes in/var/www? Wtf patrick?), the Linux world is far too big to do that. Hell, we can't even document stuf coherently -- everything has its own man page, readme, manual, plus linux documentation project. Compare to FreeBSD's Handbook.
This is a weakness in the Linux system of cooperation. It's also a strength. Just as no one can take control of the whole thing and fix it, also nobody can break the whole thing. Even if Linux and Cox between them decided to sabotage Linux, they couldn't, whereas one guy with cvs commit privileges on cvsup.freebsd.org could give himself a root shell on every BSD box on the planet. (Okay I exaggerate -- he'd get caught, probably, but that's only because most of the people working on BSD are good guys.)
Debian is an OS?
on
Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
*blink*
I thought Debian was a distribution? That is, it's a kernel and assorted utilities. If we want to get right down to it, I always thought the kernel itself was the OS...
What makes a distribution is its installer and software management. That is, the main difference between SuSE and Debian and Red Hat is yast, apt, and rpm. So... They're porting apt to NetBSD? That's well and good, but is both unnecessary and not worth this fanfare.
All of these are ISPs, but specifically geared toward gaming -- that is, low ping, ample game servers, admins available to kick cheaters, etc. Most of them have a presence on QuakeNet, for those IRC-inclined.
Someday the States will have a gaming ISP as well.
The quick analogy is WIndows, which does precisely the kind of autoconfiguration that we're talking about here. You know, when you install it, it says "Detecting system hardware..." or something along those lines?
If Linux did that, and insmod'd and all the other fun stuf, then and only then could I see Linux taking off on the desktop. Until Linux can automagically detect your hardware and make your kernel work with it, Linux has no place on the desktop -- it's by geeks for geeks, and any nongeek who tries to use it is not only out of their element, they're not even supposed to be in that element.
Re:Having worked with both...
on
Apache 2.0 vs. IIS
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· Score: 2, Informative
My chief admin tools for Apache are ssh and vi. No such option on Windows. Leaving aside all other issues, Apache is easier to admin just because you can do it over a 14.4 modem at your parents' house if that's where you happen to be when you get paged. With Windows, you can VNC or PCAnywhere, neither of which is tolerable over modem. That's why I believe firmly that Windows does not belong on servers: They need a monitor.
What percentage of Slashdot readers understand Belgian? 2%?
Honestly, I hate it when there are links to Heise, because I don't speak German, but there are at least a lot of German speakers online. Belgian speakers? Is Belgian even a language? I thought they spoke Dutch/French there?
Can we please try to at least provide English translations, for the 95% of the net that speaks English? No, the fish is not good enough; you can understand the gist most times, but never the details.
Not necessarily. How many people read InfoWorld, InfoWeek, Mac World, Mac Week, Computer Buyer,... The list goes on and on of "magazines" that, as far as I can tell, are nothing but advertisements. Yet many decent magazines have gone under while these are still going strong.
It is my fear that as more venues repackage ads as news (TV news has been doing it for years), more people will just kick back and take the ads as news. I'm not sure if that's cause or effect of my cynicism. Maybe both.
I've heard (probably myth) that chess was invented for just such a reason: So the kings can have their virtual battle, without killing the tax base or destroying the revenue stream. I mean uhh, citizens and crops, respectively.
This is one thing I always agreed with Ayatolla Khomeini on -- wars are almost never between countries, they're between presidents and kings. Better, then, to let the presidents and kings kill each other, and leave the populace out of it.
Drone wars? Proxy wars.
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Entirely different" ? Not even. The chief distinction I'm seeing drawn here is that nobody we care about dies in a drone war -- which has been true of a dozen proxy actions over the past half century.
Oh sure, the US and Russia never openly fought, but used proxies instead, with US backing Iraq and USSR backing Iran, for example. That's not a drone war, you say? But it satisfies the chief distinction mentioned above: Just some arabs killing each other for us, nobody anyone cares about.
And "more remote" he calls it -- the proxy wars in Chile and Nicaragua barely made a mention on the collective American consciousness back when they were current events. How many people remember them now?
Nope, sorry, drone wars as Katz is describing is hardly a new thing. The only difference that may be slashdot worthy is the probability of using robots of metal rather than flesh.
It's all a myth: There is no holdup of broadband. The thing is, this is just a really fucking huge country.
Most (all?) medium to large cities have two or more broadbands available, usually 1 cable company and 1 phone company offering DSL, plus multiple ISPs willing to offer you IP services for the phone company's DSL.
The United States is some 3,000 miles across, with much of that being sparsely populated great planes and midwest and almost empty Rockies. However sparsely populated, though, there's a lot of people there, just because it's an immense area. That's where the myth of 'no broadband' comes from -- all those people in places that are too sparsely populated for it to be worth while to replace equipment out there.
That is the defining factor of American telecommunications: Sheer distance. Our networks, relatively speaking, suck: We use T1s (1.544mbps) whereas Europeans use E1s (2mbps), because our telecoms don't have the signalling bandwidth. But we have a whole lot of it, hundreds of thousands of miles of wires.
So it comes down once again to money: The high profit areas (read: high population density areas) have broadband, usually 2 or more kinds, or the telcos are frantically rolling it out as fast as they can. The low profit/low population density areas will get upgraded in the next round of maintenance replacements.
This will probably be marked down as a troll, but the question has always bothered me: Why is sex a bad thing? In any instance, actually. Why is is violence on television a bad thing? Okay, that one I can see, though as noted multiple times there is no evidence that media violence translates to real violence. "Bad" words? What's the point?
So my question comes in two parts: First, why do we say that certain arrangements of phonemes are bad? It can't be meaning, because we can reword it and get past the censors, so it's just the sound we're concerned about. Second, why does the government get to regulate this?
And, as a third point, what makes you think children are any different from adults in this sense? What is the difference between someone 17 and 18, that one can handle GTA3 or Postal, while the other can't?
These decisions can only be made by parents, and later by individuals. I'm not sure these decisions need to be made at all, but if so, then definitely not by government.
Because, simply put, it's more profitable for them to use the pound.
You know how stock works, right? Each share you buy is a corresponding piece of the company. Currency works roughly the same way -- each dollar you have is a share in the company that is the US economy; each pound sterling you have is a share in the UK economy.
When you merge currencies, such as the Euro taking over several other currencies, you create in effect one big company with the averaged share prices of all the component companies/countries.
Just as the stock price of a company is affected by many factors, so too the worth of a currency. One of the chief factors is national debt. Incidentally, this is why the dollar is always so low against the pound -- the brits have virtually no debt, while the yanks have several trillion dollars to pay back. Italyis another enormous debtor -- they have several grillion lira to pay back, which is why there are 0.000323954 lira to the pound. Yes, that's right, 0.03 pence per lira.
Now, back to the euro thingy. It's quite simple -- the UK has the high performing part of the company; why would they want to bring their stock down by merging with the low performers? t would be something like Amazon of 1999 merging with Amazon of today. The high performer, the UK, would end up in effect underwriting Italy's national debt. (Italy actually had to pay off a not insignificant bit of its debt before the other countries would let it join.) Actually, since it's the high end of the spectrum, the UK would effectively be backing all the other countries' debts, along with Germany and some other rich countries.
The net effect of the single euro currency will be precisely that of a merger, but without the concomitant passage of power. Kind of makes it a bad deal for the rich countries, while the poor ones make out well, which is precisely why the UK and Scandinavia refrained. Same reason Norway has stayed out of the EU entirely.
There's a fourth possibility, which is how mine went -- you're hired on part-time, and all the paperwork says part-time, but in my view if you put in 50 hours a week it's full-time no matter what the paperwork says.
Or, a fifth possibility: You're contracted on a project basis, that being, "Here are the requirements we need, deliver the software in three weeks for your 8 grand check." No hours involved, no pesky child labor laws, but I can't believe anyone would say that's not professional experience.
Through one ironic twist, age discrimination is sometimes legal. No, they can't fire you because you're too old, but I've thus far been unable to find any laws or case studies where firing someone because they're too young was considered illegal.
Short answer is: Suck it down. In five or ten years you'll be old enough that people take you seriously. I've been doing (full time paid real work) sysadmin work since I was fourteen; now that I'm22, people begin to take me seriously. I assume it will only get better as time goes on. Meantime, just save some money from your current job in case you lose it.
Freenet was discussing having random or resettable listening ports, back when I was on the devel list about two years ago. I imagine it's been implemented by now.
In the future, I imagine most peer to peer systems will use node discovery systems like ALPINE to discover nodes listening on any port and possibly even using any of the major layer 4 protocols.
Precisely. "When will it end?" the original post moans. It will end when the ISPs' profit/loss spreadsheets start telling them that any more limiting/filtering they do will start losing them money. For now they save more money on reclaimed bandwidth than they lose on leaving customers, so capping and filtering is a good policy. When they lose more money due to leaving customers than they save in bandwidth, they'll stop capping and filterng.
none of us here are stupid enough to believe ATT wants to give you good service, are we? We all know that ATT (or whatever your ISP is) exists solely to make money. Providing service is only a means to that end, and they will tailor that means to get the most profit out of it. If you want to change it, either become a stockholder and vote, or vote by going to an uncapped ISP.
You need a static IP for various reasons, everything from pinholes through a firewall to running a small server. Back when I had static IP DSL I allowed only a single IP (mine) to ssh into my servers at work; much more secure than allowing the entire 4 class C range that I -could- have gotten through DHCP. Also, PacBell's terms of service allowed me to run servers, so of course I had my mp3s shared via ftp so I could listen from work. also, it's just plain simpler to set up than dhcpcd, much less PPPoE.
I'm sure people can think of other reasons, but those are the reasons I felt the 5 static IPs were worth the extra $40 a month.
The internet is already popular in lots of places where English is not the primary language, yet English is still the primary language for (guesstimate) 90% of the internet. I'm speaking primarily of places like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway... The people there speak English online.
Besides, ASCII (or ANSI) is already pretty basic to the way the internet is structured; it would be pretty hard to implement Chinese pictographs into all our software. (Yes I know it's been done, but that's hardly an elegant solution any way you look at it.)
Anyone in a technical field is going to have to speak English anyway, to read the error messages and RFCs if nothing else, and generally the techies are on the internet before normal humans anyway.
Given all this, and probably more points I haven't thought of yet, I imagine the main effect of internet in China will be more Chinese learning English than workarounds to support their unsupportable language structure.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is twofold: First, many people simply don't have money, or don't have disposable money to pay on software, and second, the license agreement is just too easy to break.
Now, I personally think MS Office is good software. And a lot of it -- I'd gladly pay Microsoft $80 for it (if I had $80 which I don't.) How much does Office run these days, $400? ($488.22 from CompUSA, just checked.) So what do I do with my $80?
You can't possibly believe that MS Office is worth nearly $500, or if you do, I've got an assload of software I'll sell you at those inflated prices.
Now, if I were to pirate MS Office, then your argument that Microsoft loses money vanishes into thin air. I wouldn't buy it at $500, no matter what, so they're not losing money. Hell, I'd be glad to give them $80, and I bet that would cover all their development costs. Seen in that sense, piracy is not theft, since nobody loses anything.
The second part of the problem is that it's just too easy to pirate. This goes especially for shareware, getting back to the original post. Free download, free use, after 30 days it starts beeping at me. Big whoop, I can put up with that, it's a hell of a lot easier than cracking Office.
This is where GNU-style or BSD-style free software gets its kick: It's much harder to break the license.
Let's be honest, very few people read or care about the GPL any more than they do Microsoft's EULA. The difference is that it's much harder to break the GPL, since the things that people will do with software in the course of using it (use it, share it, customize it) are allowed by the GPL. Microsoft could learn a lesson.
So this shareware outfit is sick of people "ripping them off"? Then take these two factors into account: First, is it priced right? I'd like to reiterate to any Microsoft types who might be listening: I think Office is well worth $80, and I'd pay $80 for it. That's $80 more than you're getting off me now. The same applies for this shareware thing. I've seen simple shareware that wants $40, and is obviously worth $5. Who wants to guess whether I paid for that?
Also, make sure your license agreement doesn't get in the way of normal use. Allow people to freely copy and play with and whatever.
Thirdly, rather than a MS-like product activation process, you may want to consider Valve's World ONline system, which I think is the best solution yet. Every license carries with it a WONid. The software is freely downloadable, and you can have as many copies as you like. The catch is that on startup it transmits your WONid to a server, which kicks you if your WONid is already in use. (I assume -- I've never been kicked, but then I don't give out my WONid.) The result is that you pay for use, rather than for software.
It's not a typo. Just because it's more secure doesn't mean people percieve it as more secure. And perception is far more important than fact in this instance. It also doesn't mean it's "secure" in the sense that anyone who know how dangerous it was would do it. Yet, people hand their credit cards to waiters and waitresses all the time...
The main problems of online retailing are, first, it's online, and second, it's retail.
The first means that it's inherently insecure. Oh shut up about encryption, I used to work for one of these places, I know how insecure it is. Fact is it's more secure than handing your credit card to a waiter, but it's still pretty close to nil. It also means you'll have to pay for shipping and wait 3 days to get your thing. Impulse buying is out the door then, and most retailers will tell you that's where the bulk of their profit is.
The second factor is that it's retail, which is historically a low margin industry. Plus, in order to make people change their buying habits, the online retailers need to undercut offline competitors prices, not just by a little, but by a LOT, because they need to offset shipping as well.
What this comes out to is: The biggest profit to be made from online retail is in shipping. UPS and FedEx stand to make a mint off online retail, while the online retailers are stuck with low margins and high priced security consultants to assuage the public's fears.
Which is not to say that there's no money to be made in online retail, just that it's not the mountains of dollars that Jeff Bezos says.
Not just Universities either. The UK does it to recruit spooks.
The theory is sound: If you want good people, don't ask them to write a self-aggrandizing paper, set them a real-world, if trivial, challenge. The world is open-book, so the reward (job scholarship admission whatnot) goes to the person who can find the answer by whatever means.
Unrelated, but follows: A reference librarian is oftentimes better to have than a genius.
This is true of the kernel, but the kernel is not the whole deal. One of the major problems with Linux is *that* it's every yahoo for himself -- Cox and Torvalds and a few others do the kernel, the glibc people are a different bunch, the X consortium, the ISC, Apache Foundation, plus all those assorted little libraries, you know the type, it's a kinda neat library, but you've only found 1 app that needs it
So, where the BSD team is some 10-20 people who can all get in a room and hash out details and come out with a coherent ports system, or a standard place to put software (apache goes in
This is a weakness in the Linux system of cooperation. It's also a strength. Just as no one can take control of the whole thing and fix it, also nobody can break the whole thing. Even if Linux and Cox between them decided to sabotage Linux, they couldn't, whereas one guy with cvs commit privileges on cvsup.freebsd.org could give himself a root shell on every BSD box on the planet. (Okay I exaggerate -- he'd get caught, probably, but that's only because most of the people working on BSD are good guys.)
*blink*
I thought Debian was a distribution? That is, it's a kernel and assorted utilities. If we want to get right down to it, I always thought the kernel itself was the OS...
What makes a distribution is its installer and software management. That is, the main difference between SuSE and Debian and Red Hat is yast, apt, and rpm. So... They're porting apt to NetBSD? That's well and good, but is both unnecessary and not worth this fanfare.
Or The Assembly in Finland.
All of these are ISPs, but specifically geared toward gaming -- that is, low ping, ample game servers, admins available to kick cheaters, etc. Most of them have a presence on QuakeNet, for those IRC-inclined.
Someday the States will have a gaming ISP as well.
The quick analogy is WIndows, which does precisely the kind of autoconfiguration that we're talking about here. You know, when you install it, it says "Detecting system hardware..." or something along those lines?
If Linux did that, and insmod'd and all the other fun stuf, then and only then could I see Linux taking off on the desktop. Until Linux can automagically detect your hardware and make your kernel work with it, Linux has no place on the desktop -- it's by geeks for geeks, and any nongeek who tries to use it is not only out of their element, they're not even supposed to be in that element.
My chief admin tools for Apache are ssh and vi. No such option on Windows. Leaving aside all other issues, Apache is easier to admin just because you can do it over a 14.4 modem at your parents' house if that's where you happen to be when you get paged. With Windows, you can VNC or PCAnywhere, neither of which is tolerable over modem. That's why I believe firmly that Windows does not belong on servers: They need a monitor.
Am I the only person who first thought "Tessier/Ashpool" ?
What percentage of Slashdot readers understand Belgian? 2%?
Honestly, I hate it when there are links to Heise, because I don't speak German, but there are at least a lot of German speakers online. Belgian speakers? Is Belgian even a language? I thought they spoke Dutch/French there?
Can we please try to at least provide English translations, for the 95% of the net that speaks English? No, the fish is not good enough; you can understand the gist most times, but never the details.
Not necessarily. How many people read InfoWorld, InfoWeek, Mac World, Mac Week, Computer Buyer, ... The list goes on and on of "magazines" that, as far as I can tell, are nothing but advertisements. Yet many decent magazines have gone under while these are still going strong.
It is my fear that as more venues repackage ads as news (TV news has been doing it for years), more people will just kick back and take the ads as news. I'm not sure if that's cause or effect of my cynicism. Maybe both.
I've heard (probably myth) that chess was invented for just such a reason: So the kings can have their virtual battle, without killing the tax base or destroying the revenue stream. I mean uhh, citizens and crops, respectively.
This is one thing I always agreed with Ayatolla Khomeini on -- wars are almost never between countries, they're between presidents and kings. Better, then, to let the presidents and kings kill each other, and leave the populace out of it.
"Entirely different" ? Not even. The chief distinction I'm seeing drawn here is that nobody we care about dies in a drone war -- which has been true of a dozen proxy actions over the past half century.
Oh sure, the US and Russia never openly fought, but used proxies instead, with US backing Iraq and USSR backing Iran, for example. That's not a drone war, you say? But it satisfies the chief distinction mentioned above: Just some arabs killing each other for us, nobody anyone cares about.
And "more remote" he calls it -- the proxy wars in Chile and Nicaragua barely made a mention on the collective American consciousness back when they were current events. How many people remember them now?
Nope, sorry, drone wars as Katz is describing is hardly a new thing. The only difference that may be slashdot worthy is the probability of using robots of metal rather than flesh.
It's all a myth: There is no holdup of broadband. The thing is, this is just a really fucking huge country.
Most (all?) medium to large cities have two or more broadbands available, usually 1 cable company and 1 phone company offering DSL, plus multiple ISPs willing to offer you IP services for the phone company's DSL.
The United States is some 3,000 miles across, with much of that being sparsely populated great planes and midwest and almost empty Rockies. However sparsely populated, though, there's a lot of people there, just because it's an immense area. That's where the myth of 'no broadband' comes from -- all those people in places that are too sparsely populated for it to be worth while to replace equipment out there.
That is the defining factor of American telecommunications: Sheer distance. Our networks, relatively speaking, suck: We use T1s (1.544mbps) whereas Europeans use E1s (2mbps), because our telecoms don't have the signalling bandwidth. But we have a whole lot of it, hundreds of thousands of miles of wires.
So it comes down once again to money: The high profit areas (read: high population density areas) have broadband, usually 2 or more kinds, or the telcos are frantically rolling it out as fast as they can. The low profit/low population density areas will get upgraded in the next round of maintenance replacements.
This will probably be marked down as a troll, but the question has always bothered me: Why is sex a bad thing? In any instance, actually. Why is is violence on television a bad thing? Okay, that one I can see, though as noted multiple times there is no evidence that media violence translates to real violence. "Bad" words? What's the point?
So my question comes in two parts: First, why do we say that certain arrangements of phonemes are bad? It can't be meaning, because we can reword it and get past the censors, so it's just the sound we're concerned about. Second, why does the government get to regulate this?
And, as a third point, what makes you think children are any different from adults in this sense? What is the difference between someone 17 and 18, that one can handle GTA3 or Postal, while the other can't?
These decisions can only be made by parents, and later by individuals. I'm not sure these decisions need to be made at all, but if so, then definitely not by government.
Not only in the early days, either. In July-August 2001, TDC, Danish Telecom, shelled out $3.2 million for the domain tdc.dk.
Because, simply put, it's more profitable for them to use the pound.
You know how stock works, right? Each share you buy is a corresponding piece of the company. Currency works roughly the same way -- each dollar you have is a share in the company that is the US economy; each pound sterling you have is a share in the UK economy.
When you merge currencies, such as the Euro taking over several other currencies, you create in effect one big company with the averaged share prices of all the component companies/countries.
Just as the stock price of a company is affected by many factors, so too the worth of a currency. One of the chief factors is national debt. Incidentally, this is why the dollar is always so low against the pound -- the brits have virtually no debt, while the yanks have several trillion dollars to pay back. Italyis another enormous debtor -- they have several grillion lira to pay back, which is why there are 0.000323954 lira to the pound. Yes, that's right, 0.03 pence per lira.
Now, back to the euro thingy. It's quite simple -- the UK has the high performing part of the company; why would they want to bring their stock down by merging with the low performers? t would be something like Amazon of 1999 merging with Amazon of today. The high performer, the UK, would end up in effect underwriting Italy's national debt. (Italy actually had to pay off a not insignificant bit of its debt before the other countries would let it join.) Actually, since it's the high end of the spectrum, the UK would effectively be backing all the other countries' debts, along with Germany and some other rich countries.
The net effect of the single euro currency will be precisely that of a merger, but without the concomitant passage of power. Kind of makes it a bad deal for the rich countries, while the poor ones make out well, which is precisely why the UK and Scandinavia refrained. Same reason Norway has stayed out of the EU entirely.
There's a fourth possibility, which is how mine went -- you're hired on part-time, and all the paperwork says part-time, but in my view if you put in 50 hours a week it's full-time no matter what the paperwork says.
Or, a fifth possibility: You're contracted on a project basis, that being, "Here are the requirements we need, deliver the software in three weeks for your 8 grand check." No hours involved, no pesky child labor laws, but I can't believe anyone would say that's not professional experience.
Through one ironic twist, age discrimination is sometimes legal. No, they can't fire you because you're too old, but I've thus far been unable to find any laws or case studies where firing someone because they're too young was considered illegal.
Short answer is: Suck it down. In five or ten years you'll be old enough that people take you seriously. I've been doing (full time paid real work) sysadmin work since I was fourteen; now that I'm22, people begin to take me seriously. I assume it will only get better as time goes on. Meantime, just save some money from your current job in case you lose it.
In the future, I imagine most peer to peer systems will use node discovery systems like ALPINE to discover nodes listening on any port and possibly even using any of the major layer 4 protocols.
Precisely. "When will it end?" the original post moans. It will end when the ISPs' profit/loss spreadsheets start telling them that any more limiting/filtering they do will start losing them money. For now they save more money on reclaimed bandwidth than they lose on leaving customers, so capping and filtering is a good policy. When they lose more money due to leaving customers than they save in bandwidth, they'll stop capping and filterng.
none of us here are stupid enough to believe ATT wants to give you good service, are we? We all know that ATT (or whatever your ISP is) exists solely to make money. Providing service is only a means to that end, and they will tailor that means to get the most profit out of it. If you want to change it, either become a stockholder and vote, or vote by going to an uncapped ISP.
You need a static IP for various reasons, everything from pinholes through a firewall to running a small server. Back when I had static IP DSL I allowed only a single IP (mine) to ssh into my servers at work; much more secure than allowing the entire 4 class C range that I -could- have gotten through DHCP. Also, PacBell's terms of service allowed me to run servers, so of course I had my mp3s shared via ftp so I could listen from work. also, it's just plain simpler to set up than dhcpcd, much less PPPoE.
I'm sure people can think of other reasons, but those are the reasons I felt the 5 static IPs were worth the extra $40 a month.
The internet is already popular in lots of places where English is not the primary language, yet English is still the primary language for (guesstimate) 90% of the internet. I'm speaking primarily of places like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway... The people there speak English online.
Besides, ASCII (or ANSI) is already pretty basic to the way the internet is structured; it would be pretty hard to implement Chinese pictographs into all our software. (Yes I know it's been done, but that's hardly an elegant solution any way you look at it.)
Anyone in a technical field is going to have to speak English anyway, to read the error messages and RFCs if nothing else, and generally the techies are on the internet before normal humans anyway.
Given all this, and probably more points I haven't thought of yet, I imagine the main effect of internet in China will be more Chinese learning English than workarounds to support their unsupportable language structure.