I think Jon is expecting too much of Amazon. Jeff Bezos DOES want to become the K-Mart (or WalMart) of the web, and why shouldn't he? WalMart combined IT with reach to create a very profitable company that brings low-cost consumer goods to everyone. Not that bad a model (except for that whole driving small businesses out of business thing) to be following.
Ultimately, Amazon wants to be your single source for buying stuff on the web. What is wrong with that? Did anyone go postal when Yahoo! started including banner ads and corporate sites in its index. Did anyone say "Oh, Yahoo! has lost it's coolness, sold out, and become less than it should be." Maybe people did, but Yahoo! is the most powerful pure-play Internet company there is, and more power to it!
That's the thing about the market, if there's demand it will be fed. Amazon's competency is in user interface and product delivery, not in Books qua Books. Bezos said in an interview a few years ago it could have been any product, books just seemed best at the time because the people on the web were literate/intelligent and books are easy to distribute. Now that Amazon has learned how to do the good online store interface and how to efficiently distribute its goods, it's applying that to toys, and electronics, and everything else.
Where Yahoo! is the ultimate portal, Amazon seeks to be the ultimate store. The one-stop online shop. And it SHOULD because WalMart comes online in the next six months, B&N is breathing down its book-centric neck, and eBay is the king of the auction houses. Amazon must expand to grow.
So I say more power to it. Amazon means I don't have to reinput all my user info to buy a different good at a different site. Amazon means I KNOW the kind of service and guarantees I'm going to get when buying my music or electronic because they're the guarantees I got when buying my books.
Amazon is about the customer's perception of buying and selling online.
With Apache incorporating, Sendmail gone corp last year, Mozilla a flop, Linux splintering into different distributions catching up with Red Hat (yes yes, flame me for that...), what's left that is a major force on the 'Net, yet still run non-corporate? Elm? BIND? NNTP? How long until the NNTP folks form Usenet.com.corp?
We are hitting the third generation of the 'Net here, folks. The game is no longer the garage. The new rule is to incorporate as a defensive, rather than offensive move, it seems. (I find it funny that on the same day/. reports MS will attack Apache,/. also reports that Apache is incorporating.) People are incorporating to establish their authority before Big Dogs can move in on it. I think these are just more and more ripples from the death of Netscape. That was truly a changing point in the history of the 'Net as we know it.
[I fear this signals the end of kickass major infrastructure programs being developed mostly for free by mostly unpaid people.
1. The moment you start filtering content, you are liable for that content. You no longer are a common carrier. So if a library has a filtering system in place, they can be sued if a 14 year old gets past it to porn.
2. There is a fundamental rule of nature that no barrier will ever suffice to completely separate a 14 year old male and his porn.
3. There is an argument that has been made (and a Virginia state Delegate from a rural part of the state made it in testimony to the Virginia General Assembly last year) that libraries ALREADY filter content by chosing to stock some books and not choosing to stock others. Librarians are very vulnerable to this argument and in my experience have not made good arguments against it.
4. Virginia has looked into this issue deeply, through the Joint Commission on Technology and Science of the General Assembly. In that Commission's Annual Report for 1999, they addressed this very issue. (Advisory Committee One studied it, I actually was on that committee) The ultimate recommendation was against mandated filtering, and in favor of people under 18 being required to sign Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) to use Internet terminals at libraries. This way, the librarians have grounds to restrict inappropriate or illegal usage by kids under 18. Some libraries in the state have taken it upon themselves to setup separate areas with privacy desks or study carels for adult Internet use. The Commission's final report pretty conclusively posited that filters are simply unworkable in a public library environment because Internet content is changing so quickly and libraries are the public bastion of free speech and expression and are held to a very high free speech standard.
5. Finally, the Courts decided in a Virginia case, Mainstream Loudoun vs. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library, that filtering websites at libraries is not a library acquisition decision (as voiced by that Delegate noted above) and that filtering is unconstitutional if it applies unilaterally to both adults and children. Applying the same speech standards to both adults and children online was specifically overruled by the Supreme Court in Reno vs. ACLU (the CDA decision).
So unless Elizabeth Dole will commit to appointing a Federal Judges who see the constitution differently than most, (incuding the Supreme Court) she won't be able to enforce her policy. IMHO.
I think this is just a move to the Right by her in the hopes of winning conservative primary voters. I don't actually think she'll keep this policy all the way through the campaign, and if she makes it past Iowa and New Hampshire, I seriously doubt we'll ever hear it again. It's a political tactic to try to win a conservative voting base among Republican primary voters.
Methinks you're doing the right thing. You appear to have got the infrastructure you need without going 'corp.' ('course, I'm one to talk, I AM a corp...)
I think the slashdot community ought to get behind this. It's only gonna help us get better service and access. IMHO, it took a lot of guts to go ahead with this. There's the potential for a lot of backlash against going in with a for-profit company. But in the end, as with everything in the tech world, it's evolve and improve or die. That's no different for slashdot. This will allow you to evolve and improve.
The fun thing is, "There's always a bigger fish." (sorry, Qui-Gon)
Everyone is paranoid about Qwest becoming the next AT&T when there are a lot of other companies doing similar things, quietly. Yes, there will be a lot of really huge companies running the telco show for a while, but they ALWAYS get smacked around by a small company in the next economic upheval. (WorldCom is the seminal example of the 90s. MCI is the seminal example of the 70s and 80s.) It's the nature of corporate and competitive evolution. And if the big U.S. companies get lazy, faster foreign companies will come in and compete with them (U.S. automobile market, late 1970s).
Here are just SOME of the waiting-in-the-wings competitors: Level3, whom I think will probably merge with Sprint in a blockbuster move. They're doing a Qwest "if you build the fiber, they will come" strategy, but they're not selling traditional circuits or cloud services. They're going to be wholesaling IP, that's it.
PSINet, who is just ACHING for a telco merger partner to get some respect with (like UUNet did with MFS and WorldCom). They've got the network and the know how even if they are perceived as a third-choice vendor.
Euro-powers: Telekom (Germany) will make a bid for France Telecom's share of Global One soon, which will put that company in the drivers seat of G1. G1 has a lot of clients in the US. Meanwhile BT has been cut out of the US market by its alliance with AT&T in a move incredibly reminiscent of (forgive me) the Hitler-Stalin pact.;-) And C&W owns MCI's former Internet business, which gives them competitive strength in the market.
Asian-powers: NTT, KDD and others are also eyeing the US market.
The key is opening up the local loop, which is happening in spite of the baby bells in many places. I, for one, get my phone service from my cable TV provider here, and it's NOT AT&T. Cell phones are becoming so ubiquitous that many people are using them as their primary phone.
The mergers we're seeing are a manifestation of the dynamism of the industry, not necessarily a competitive threat. LET Qwest by USWest's problems, and either reform 'em or fail. Either way, the end consumer wins.
Well...you may not want to be so vitriolic against us Virginian Crackers, as you say. MAE-East (through which a plurality of Internet traffic routes) is in a garage in Tysons Corner. UUNET is based in Virginia, and most major backbone providers have major offices somewhere on the Dulles Toll Road. If Silicon Valley is leading the computer revolution, Northern Virginia is leading the telecom one...
So you basically want more bandwidth, but don't want to pay for it. You could get pretty much all the bandwidth you want by purchasing a DirectPC dish. That would've been illegal before the breakup of AT&T. Oh, wait it COSTS MONEY to get that bandwidth.
I guess it's just easier to complain.
Ah well...back to keeping the 'Net humming. It's what we Virginia Crackers do, you know.
(Warning: a bit off topic) Actually, my cable phone service (From the local provider - Jones Communications) is BETTER than the RBOC's (Bell Atlantic). There was a major fiber cut next door to my apartment complex. The BA phones throughout the complex were out for three days. But those of us on the Jones phones had full service with no interruption because it was on a separate fiber and exit point from the BA circuits.
That, and my two phone lines with Jones is cheaper than my one line used to be with BA.
Let's here it for (albeit limited) local loop competition!
Sm@rtReseller got wind of such a strategy last year. Here's a link to the article that outlines IBM's desire to support Netscape and Java against MS and basically declare war on MS at the desktop. FASCINATING read. I highly recommend it.
Excerpt: "What does all that mean? In a nutshell, the paper says IBM is striving to keep corporate desktops open by teaming with Netscape Communications Corp. to position Java applications against Microsoft's COM/DCOM object model, "which locks customers into Windows on both the client and the server."
IBM hopes to ensure that 50 percent of PCs in 2003 are capable of running 100% Pure Java applications. "We will accomplish this by helping Netscape remain a major player on the desktop and ensuring the 100% Pure Java applications will run in Microsoft's Internet Explorer," the document says.
So far, much of the strategy in this whitepaper (which is from July '98) has been blown away by market movements - Antitrust trial, breakup of Netscape, Java squabbles, etc. - but it does indicate that IBM is committed to not allowing MS to rule the world.
2000 random people in the U.S. More folks in Italy and Singapore in the 1st year.
What do you think the chances are that a REAL geek will be in the sample? What do you think the chances are that the geek's results will be discounted as an "outlier."
Now, if it had been the US, FINLAND and Italy... ;-)
Thing is, AlterNic wasn't really Open Source and neutral. They were in it specifically to take down and show-up InterNic, IMHO. If a truly neutral, non-commercial, supported by a community of volunteers version of InterNic existed, it might very well work.
'Course, again, ICANN is supposed to be that and do that in it's own way.
We could really use Jon Postel right now, methinks.
Of course, this ruling will be appealed like mad. It probably should be. If AT&T has to open up the cable infrastructure it paid millions for, what incentive does the company have to upgrade that infrastructure to control for bandwidth-sharing problems that WILL happen on cable networks as more people get cable modems?
Remember, Cable is a little like Ethernet, it's a shared medium. If everyone gets a cable modem, or even, say, half the houses in a neighborhood, you could be logging in at the same speed as your modem. There is NO incentive to upgrade the plant so it's always faster than a modem if AT&T has to both amortize the purchase price of TCI/Media One AND open the networks to competitors. It's not like the Bells, who have had ~50 years to amortize the initial construction costs and ~15 years to amortize the upgrade costs after the breakup of AT&T.
IMHO, the government/state PUCs should negotiate a 5-year deal whereby AT&T (or any cable company willing to upgrade their cable plant) gets 5 years of monopoly over its cable networks, and after that is required to open 'em up to competitors. AT&T ought to be able to recoup the upgrade costs through 5-years of monopoly rents, and in the end we all benefit from both competition and better access. There is precedent with the various AT&T-FCC agreements of the past 65 years as well as the MFJ (the agreemen which broke up the Bell System).
American kids are the result of the "ME" generation. It's all about them, it's all about being 'happy with who they are'. It's all about being 'special'. They lack the feeling of community and common welfare.
Now I disagree with this. I think that we rather do understand a feeling of community and common welfare. Our community is the GEEK community. Our common welfare is the welfare of all geeks who get kicked around in school. Sure, our community isn't necessarily the town in which we grew up or even the town in which we live now that we're successful. Our community is, well, the geeks on the 'Net, or the members of our gaming club and people who go to Cons, or SCA crews.
And we DO care about each other and the common welfare of this community, more so than many other communities of interest, I would argue. (Jocks in HS tend to compete and conflict with jocks in other HS's; geeks in one HS will as often as not collaborate with and support geeks in other HS's...)
Perchance the American youth, and Americans in general, are self-centered in terms of suffering, but that's a result of a million social factors, history and other things as much as a genuine egoism. I honestly don't think that any one nationality is more self-centered than another. [Just so happens that 50% of the folks on the 'Net these days are young Americans, because that's where the access is available. Also, American culture lends itself to speaking your mind, loudly, and arguing with each other. Federalist 51, the free marketplace of ideas, etc...]
Geeks, on the other hand, may very well be a little more self-centered, but I think that has to do with the fact that the things that interest geeks interest so few other people (and all of them are fellow geeks) that interest simply breeds a quasi-self-centered focus.
It's up to you to figure out how to win the game. Spraying a school with bullets isn't the answer. Succeeding is the answer. I completely agree with this.
I moved from my original home in NH when I was a Freshman in HS, and I vowed to go back someday when I was successful and lay the demons of being a kid to rest somehow. When I finally graduated from college, successful, with a job doing something I loved in a field I was good at waiting for me, I drove back to NH and walked to the town green (ah New England), stared at all the buildings and the place itself, threw back my head, and LAUGHED MY HEAD OFF. I laughed at all of them because I'd made it in spite of them. As I drove away from that place, I punched in "Kiss Off" by the Femmes and cranked it up on my car stereo.
The demons were buried, I had won. I had succeeded. (end confessional rant;-)
Perhaps it would make sense (if there is concern about/. navel-gazing too much) to have a box in the preferences section allowing readers to block out navel-gazing slashdot articles like we can currently block out certain authors? Or perhaps relegate non-fundamental slashdot-centric news (aka, articles other than "We're getting sued by MS" or "I'm changing the format to FrontPage on IIS on NT 4.0";-) to a slashbox option?
So is this the same as MS vs. Netscape or different? 1. MS was afraid of Netscape 2. MS writes Navigator clone, then 'embraces and extends' it, bundling it into the Windows OS, giving it away for free 3. Navigator market share crumbles 4. Netscape loses momentum and edge, stock decreases (perhaps causing some Netscape coders to rethink their options...literally?) 5. IE 5.0 debuts to rave pundit reviews, Netscape is broken up and sold in pieces to two lesser industry evils...
1. MS is afraid of Linux 2. MS is NOW writing a Lunix clone (think I remember a/. article on this...but don't see it in the older section...could be simply delusional) as well as porting IE to Linux - embrace and extend from multiple fronts 3. Unix market share, viz NT, is crumbling (Linux is cannibalizing the commercial Unix marketshare for its own marketshare, rather than converting NT shops to Unix, IMHO)
But here is where I think it's different.
4. Linux DEVELOPMENT is non-commercial. The psychic well-being of the coders is not dependent on the fate of a single company, or stock options. Linux should retain its momentum and edge for at LEAST another year 5. Next year conflicts among Linux distributions become a much bigger issue as marketshare growth for Linux begins to flatten - most commercial Unices other than Solaris will probably be inconsequential by this time next year. (blatent, unfounded, bold, bull-ony prediction) 6. MS folds Linux-like functionality into NT, making the OS even more unweildy, but allowing MS to claim to the biz market it has all the good parts of Linux, without that bad lack-of-single-vendor part. Glossy mags go wild for MS LiNTux (thereby MS co-opts both Tux and Linux while keeping the NT brand).
7. Linux coders setup the "Free State of Silicon Valley and Finland," declare war on "The People's Republic of Redmond."
8. President Ventura intervenes, sending in the 101st Airborn and SeALs. As the first victorious third-party candidate in US history, he asserts that precedent to legally mandate all computers to run a third-party OS...BEOS!!!
Data Communications ran a really good, comprehensive article on this in this month's issue. It talks about the competitors in this market, strengths and weaknesses, and issues like fraud. I think Enron's PR department is just doing a better job than those of folks like arbinet, which is why they get credit for 'proposing' an idea that's already been implemented by at leat seven companies. FYI, the article at Data.com says you can get a T1 from NY to LA for between $3900 and $4800 through the brokers, compared to three times that from major carriers. Data Comm...gude sctuff.
DEC had a services arm that Compaq absolutely coveted to compete against IBM. DEC was the only company going head to head with IBM in the large systems implementation services field. http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?IWK1998 0617S0007 Compaq has been foundering since though...Margins falling on PC's etc.
About a decade ago, Digital laid off about the same number, maybe more, at their Sanders plant in Nashua. It was one of the causes of the 1991-2 recession in New Hampshire and is said to have cost Bush a ton of momentum and helped Clinton get some name recognition. About 20% of my friends' dads were out of work as a result of that downsizing. With Cabletron on the skids as well, doesn't sound like a good time for tech in New Hampshire...
Slashdot Mirror
I think Jon is expecting too much of Amazon. Jeff Bezos DOES want to become the K-Mart (or WalMart) of the web, and why shouldn't he? WalMart combined IT with reach to create a very profitable company that brings low-cost consumer goods to everyone. Not that bad a model (except for that whole driving small businesses out of business thing) to be following.
Ultimately, Amazon wants to be your single source for buying stuff on the web. What is wrong with that? Did anyone go postal when Yahoo! started including banner ads and corporate sites in its index. Did anyone say "Oh, Yahoo! has lost it's coolness, sold out, and become less than it should be." Maybe people did, but Yahoo! is the most powerful pure-play Internet company there is, and more power to it!
That's the thing about the market, if there's demand it will be fed. Amazon's competency is in user interface and product delivery, not in Books qua Books. Bezos said in an interview a few years ago it could have been any product, books just seemed best at the time because the people on the web were literate/intelligent and books are easy to distribute. Now that Amazon has learned how to do the good online store interface and how to efficiently distribute its goods, it's applying that to toys, and electronics, and everything else.
Where Yahoo! is the ultimate portal, Amazon seeks to be the ultimate store. The one-stop online shop. And it SHOULD because WalMart comes online in the next six months, B&N is breathing down its book-centric neck, and eBay is the king of the auction houses. Amazon must expand to grow.
So I say more power to it. Amazon means I don't have to reinput all my user info to buy a different good at a different site. Amazon means I KNOW the kind of service and guarantees I'm going to get when buying my music or electronic because they're the guarantees I got when buying my books.
Amazon is about the customer's perception of buying and selling online.
It's not just about books.
IMHO.
With Apache incorporating, Sendmail gone corp last year, Mozilla a flop, Linux splintering into different distributions catching up with Red Hat (yes yes, flame me for that...), what's left that is a major force on the 'Net, yet still run non-corporate? Elm? BIND? NNTP? How long until the NNTP folks form Usenet.com.corp?
/. reports MS will attack Apache, /. also reports that Apache is incorporating.) People are incorporating to establish their authority before Big Dogs can move in on it. I think these are just more and more ripples from the death of Netscape. That was truly a changing point in the history of the 'Net as we know it.
We are hitting the third generation of the 'Net here, folks. The game is no longer the garage. The new rule is to incorporate as a defensive, rather than offensive move, it seems. (I find it funny that on the same day
[I fear this signals the end of kickass major infrastructure programs being developed mostly for free by mostly unpaid people.
Not that I'm one to talk...]
A couple things
1. The moment you start filtering content, you are liable for that content. You no longer are a common carrier. So if a library has a filtering system in place, they can be sued if a 14 year old gets past it to porn.
2. There is a fundamental rule of nature that no barrier will ever suffice to completely separate a 14 year old male and his porn.
3. There is an argument that has been made (and a Virginia state Delegate from a rural part of the state made it in testimony to the Virginia General Assembly last year) that libraries ALREADY filter content by chosing to stock some books and not choosing to stock others. Librarians are very vulnerable to this argument and in my experience have not made good arguments against it.
4. Virginia has looked into this issue deeply, through the Joint Commission on Technology and Science of the General Assembly. In that Commission's Annual Report for 1999, they addressed this very issue. (Advisory Committee One studied it, I actually was on that committee) The ultimate recommendation was against mandated filtering, and in favor of people under 18 being required to sign Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) to use Internet terminals at libraries. This way, the librarians have grounds to restrict inappropriate or illegal usage by kids under 18. Some libraries in the state have taken it upon themselves to setup separate areas with privacy desks or study carels for adult Internet use. The Commission's final report pretty conclusively posited that filters are simply unworkable in a public library environment because Internet content is changing so quickly and libraries are the public bastion of free speech and expression and are held to a very high free speech standard.
5. Finally, the Courts decided in a Virginia case, Mainstream Loudoun vs. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library, that filtering websites at libraries is not a library acquisition decision (as voiced by that Delegate noted above) and that filtering is unconstitutional if it applies unilaterally to both adults and children. Applying the same speech standards to both adults and children online was specifically overruled by the Supreme Court in Reno vs. ACLU (the CDA decision).
So unless Elizabeth Dole will commit to appointing a Federal Judges who see the constitution differently than most, (incuding the Supreme Court) she won't be able to enforce her policy. IMHO.
I think this is just a move to the Right by her in the hopes of winning conservative primary voters. I don't actually think she'll keep this policy all the way through the campaign, and if she makes it past Iowa and New Hampshire, I seriously doubt we'll ever hear it again. It's a political tactic to try to win a conservative voting base among Republican primary voters.
IMHO
Guys,
Methinks you're doing the right thing. You appear to have got the infrastructure you need without going 'corp.' ('course, I'm one to talk, I AM a corp...)
I think the slashdot community ought to get behind this. It's only gonna help us get better service and access. IMHO, it took a lot of guts to go ahead with this. There's the potential for a lot of backlash against going in with a for-profit company. But in the end, as with everything in the tech world, it's evolve and improve or die. That's no different for slashdot. This will allow you to evolve and improve.
Keep up the excellent work.
The fun thing is, "There's always a bigger fish." (sorry, Qui-Gon)
;-) And C&W owns MCI's former Internet business, which gives them competitive strength in the market.
Everyone is paranoid about Qwest becoming the next AT&T when there are a lot of other companies doing similar things, quietly. Yes, there will be a lot of really huge companies running the telco show for a while, but they ALWAYS get smacked around by a small company in the next economic upheval. (WorldCom is the seminal example of the 90s. MCI is the seminal example of the 70s and 80s.) It's the nature of corporate and competitive evolution. And if the big U.S. companies get lazy, faster foreign companies will come in and compete with them (U.S. automobile market, late 1970s).
Here are just SOME of the waiting-in-the-wings competitors:
Level3, whom I think will probably merge with Sprint in a blockbuster move. They're doing a Qwest "if you build the fiber, they will come" strategy, but they're not selling traditional circuits or cloud services. They're going to be wholesaling IP, that's it.
PSINet, who is just ACHING for a telco merger partner to get some respect with (like UUNet did with MFS and WorldCom). They've got the network and the know how even if they are perceived as a third-choice vendor.
Euro-powers: Telekom (Germany) will make a bid for France Telecom's share of Global One soon, which will put that company in the drivers seat of G1. G1 has a lot of clients in the US. Meanwhile BT has been cut out of the US market by its alliance with AT&T in a move incredibly reminiscent of (forgive me) the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Asian-powers: NTT, KDD and others are also eyeing the US market.
The key is opening up the local loop, which is happening in spite of the baby bells in many places. I, for one, get my phone service from my cable TV provider here, and it's NOT AT&T. Cell phones are becoming so ubiquitous that many people are using them as their primary phone.
The mergers we're seeing are a manifestation of the dynamism of the industry, not necessarily a competitive threat. LET Qwest by USWest's problems, and either reform 'em or fail. Either way, the end consumer wins.
That's just how I see it.
Well...you may not want to be so vitriolic against us Virginian Crackers, as you say. MAE-East (through which a plurality of Internet traffic routes) is in a garage in Tysons Corner. UUNET is based in Virginia, and most major backbone providers have major offices somewhere on the Dulles Toll Road. If Silicon Valley is leading the computer revolution, Northern Virginia is leading the telecom one...
So you basically want more bandwidth, but don't want to pay for it. You could get pretty much all the bandwidth you want by purchasing a DirectPC dish. That would've been illegal before the breakup of AT&T. Oh, wait it COSTS MONEY to get that bandwidth.
I guess it's just easier to complain.
Ah well...back to keeping the 'Net humming. It's what we Virginia Crackers do, you know.
(Warning: a bit off topic)
Actually, my cable phone service (From the local provider - Jones Communications) is BETTER than the RBOC's (Bell Atlantic). There was a major fiber cut next door to my apartment complex. The BA phones throughout the complex were out for three days. But those of us on the Jones phones had full service with no interruption because it was on a separate fiber and exit point from the BA circuits.
That, and my two phone lines with Jones is cheaper than my one line used to be with BA.
Let's here it for (albeit limited) local loop competition!
Sm@rtReseller got wind of such a strategy last year.
Here's a link to the article that outlines IBM's desire to support Netscape and Java against MS and basically declare war on MS at the desktop. FASCINATING read. I highly recommend it.
Excerpt: "What does all that mean? In a nutshell, the paper says IBM is striving to keep corporate desktops open by teaming with Netscape Communications Corp. to position Java applications
against Microsoft's COM/DCOM object model, "which locks customers into Windows on both the client and the server."
IBM hopes to ensure that 50 percent of PCs in 2003 are capable of running 100% Pure Java applications. "We will accomplish this by helping Netscape remain a major player on the desktop and
ensuring the 100% Pure Java applications will run in Microsoft's Internet Explorer," the document says.
So far, much of the strategy in this whitepaper (which is from July '98) has been blown away by market movements - Antitrust trial, breakup of Netscape, Java squabbles, etc. - but it does indicate that IBM is committed to not allowing MS to rule the world.
That's gotta be a good thing.
share and enjoy
2000 random people in the U.S.
More folks in Italy and Singapore in the 1st year.
What do you think the chances are that a REAL geek will be in the sample? What do you think the chances are that the geek's results will be discounted as an "outlier."
Now, if it had been the US, FINLAND and Italy...
;-)
Thing is, AlterNic wasn't really Open Source and neutral. They were in it specifically to take down and show-up InterNic, IMHO. If a truly neutral, non-commercial, supported by a community of volunteers version of InterNic existed, it might very well work.
'Course, again, ICANN is supposed to be that and do that in it's own way.
We could really use Jon Postel right now, methinks.
Of course, this ruling will be appealed like mad. It probably should be. If AT&T has to open up the cable infrastructure it paid millions for, what incentive does the company have to upgrade that infrastructure to control for bandwidth-sharing problems that WILL happen on cable networks as more people get cable modems?
Remember, Cable is a little like Ethernet, it's a shared medium. If everyone gets a cable modem, or even, say, half the houses in a neighborhood, you could be logging in at the same speed as your modem. There is NO incentive to upgrade the plant so it's always faster than a modem if AT&T has to both amortize the purchase price of TCI/Media One AND open the networks to competitors. It's not like the Bells, who have had ~50 years to amortize the initial construction costs and ~15 years to amortize the upgrade costs after the breakup of AT&T.
IMHO, the government/state PUCs should negotiate a 5-year deal whereby AT&T (or any cable company willing to upgrade their cable plant) gets 5 years of monopoly over its cable networks, and after that is required to open 'em up to competitors. AT&T ought to be able to recoup the upgrade costs through 5-years of monopoly rents, and in the end we all benefit from both competition and better access. There is precedent with the various AT&T-FCC agreements of the past 65 years as well as the MFJ (the agreemen which broke up the Bell System).
Just how I see it.
American kids are the result of the "ME" generation. It's all about them, it's all about being 'happy with who they are'. It's all about being 'special'. They lack the feeling of community and common welfare.
Now I disagree with this. I think that we rather do understand a feeling of community and common welfare. Our community is the GEEK community. Our common welfare is the welfare of all geeks who get kicked around in school. Sure, our community isn't necessarily the town in which we grew up or even the town in which we live now that we're successful. Our community is, well, the geeks on the 'Net, or the members of our gaming club and people who go to Cons, or SCA crews.
And we DO care about each other and the common welfare of this community, more so than many other communities of interest, I would argue. (Jocks in HS tend to compete and conflict with jocks in other HS's; geeks in one HS will as often as not collaborate with and support geeks in other HS's...)
Perchance the American youth, and Americans in general, are self-centered in terms of suffering, but that's a result of a million social factors, history and other things as much as a genuine egoism. I honestly don't think that any one nationality is more self-centered than another. [Just so happens that 50% of the folks on the 'Net these days are young Americans, because that's where the access is available. Also, American culture lends itself to speaking your mind, loudly, and arguing with each other. Federalist 51, the free marketplace of ideas, etc...]
Geeks, on the other hand, may very well be a little more self-centered, but I think that has to do with the fact that the things that interest geeks interest so few other people (and all of them are fellow geeks) that interest simply breeds a quasi-self-centered focus.
IMHO. I could easily be wrong.
It's up to you to figure out how to win the game. Spraying a school with bullets isn't the answer. Succeeding is the answer.
;-)
I completely agree with this.
I moved from my original home in NH when I was a Freshman in HS, and I vowed to go back someday when I was successful and lay the demons of being a kid to rest somehow. When I finally graduated from college, successful, with a job doing something I loved in a field I was good at waiting for me, I drove back to NH and walked to the town green (ah New England), stared at all the buildings and the place itself, threw back my head, and LAUGHED MY HEAD OFF. I laughed at all of them because I'd made it in spite of them. As I drove away from that place, I punched in "Kiss Off" by the Femmes and cranked it up on my car stereo.
The demons were buried, I had won. I had succeeded.
(end confessional rant
Perhaps it would make sense (if there is concern about /. navel-gazing too much) to have a box in the preferences section allowing readers to block out navel-gazing slashdot articles like we can currently block out certain authors? Or perhaps relegate non-fundamental slashdot-centric news (aka, articles other than "We're getting sued by MS" or "I'm changing the format to FrontPage on IIS on NT 4.0" ;-) to a slashbox option?
So is this the same as MS vs. Netscape or different?
/. article on this...but don't see it in the older section...could be simply delusional) as well as porting IE to Linux - embrace and extend from multiple fronts
1. MS was afraid of Netscape
2. MS writes Navigator clone, then 'embraces and extends' it, bundling it into the Windows OS, giving it away for free
3. Navigator market share crumbles
4. Netscape loses momentum and edge, stock decreases (perhaps causing some Netscape coders to rethink their options...literally?)
5. IE 5.0 debuts to rave pundit reviews, Netscape is broken up and sold in pieces to two lesser industry evils...
1. MS is afraid of Linux
2. MS is NOW writing a Lunix clone (think I remember a
3. Unix market share, viz NT, is crumbling (Linux is cannibalizing the commercial Unix marketshare for its own marketshare, rather than converting NT shops to Unix, IMHO)
But here is where I think it's different.
4. Linux DEVELOPMENT is non-commercial. The psychic well-being of the coders is not dependent on the fate of a single company, or stock options. Linux should retain its momentum and edge for at LEAST another year
5. Next year conflicts among Linux distributions become a much bigger issue as marketshare growth for Linux begins to flatten - most commercial Unices other than Solaris will probably be inconsequential by this time next year. (blatent, unfounded, bold, bull-ony prediction)
6. MS folds Linux-like functionality into NT, making the OS even more unweildy, but allowing MS to claim to the biz market it has all the good parts of Linux, without that bad lack-of-single-vendor part. Glossy mags go wild for MS LiNTux (thereby MS co-opts both Tux and Linux while keeping the NT brand).
7. Linux coders setup the "Free State of Silicon Valley and Finland," declare war on "The People's Republic of Redmond."
8. President Ventura intervenes, sending in the 101st Airborn and SeALs. As the first victorious third-party candidate in US history, he asserts that precedent to legally mandate all computers to run a third-party OS...BEOS!!!
Ahem...sorry...got out of hand there.
Data Communications ran a really good, comprehensive article on this in this month's issue. It talks about the competitors in this market, strengths and weaknesses, and issues like fraud. I think Enron's PR department is just doing a better job than those of folks like arbinet, which is why they get credit for 'proposing' an idea that's already been implemented by at leat seven companies.
FYI, the article at Data.com says you can get a T1 from NY to LA for between $3900 and $4800 through the brokers, compared to three times that from major carriers.
Data Comm...gude sctuff.
'Course, ICANN is theoretically International, as is ISOC, IETF...etc.
DEC had a services arm that Compaq absolutely coveted to compete against IBM. DEC was the only company going head to head with IBM in the large systems implementation services field.8 0617S0007
http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?IWK199
Compaq has been foundering since though...Margins falling on PC's etc.
About a decade ago, Digital laid off about the same number, maybe more, at their Sanders plant in Nashua. It was one of the causes of the 1991-2 recession in New Hampshire and is said to have cost Bush a ton of momentum and helped Clinton get some name recognition. About 20% of my friends' dads were out of work as a result of that downsizing. With Cabletron on the skids as well, doesn't sound like a good time for tech in New Hampshire...