AOl may not have any idea what they want to do with all those companies, but they know they do not want Microsoft to get em'. AOL & MS are both bad news.
Seriously, all those companies have significant leveraging potential (execpt maybe RedHat) but AOL is not in a position to use it. AOL can try to take MS if it aquires RedHat and merges with Apple, but my money would be on MS. The truth is that AOL has two types of executives, experenced TimeWarner folks and AOL nimrods. As much as I'd love to see Mac and Linux eat into MS's market share, TW's TV program directors are not going to be able to do it.
OTOH, AOL can keep RedHat on a leash (limit the desktop) to buy favors from MS. It violates anti-trust law, but they would get away with it.
It seems like most of your compile time changes are really the decission on the distribution (slang vs. ncurses).. and they are not going to be choices in this new Linux distribution either.
Plus, if your really stripping postgre support from the binary what happens when you latter want to install postgre? Shure, your not going to be installing postgre later if it's a server, but you might be installing postgre if it's your desktop.
Clearly, there is a market for an opimized server distribution, but flexibility is more importent in a desktop distribution. RedHat could just fork it's AMD and Intel distributions to get most of the benifits of opimizing.
Dispite all the slashbot nay sayer you are correct that MS *could* fix their security if they wanted, but I don;t believe you when you say that lack of security is costing them money. Care to provide an anrgument for those lost customers? Or perhaps reply to my other post where I claim that lack of security is not costing them customers.
As I see it Linux and Secure BSD conversions do not count since Linux is not that secure without a good admin and Secure BSD users are so paranoid that they would not run anything else anyway. You really should be looking at Mac and Oracle conversions.. and counting Oracle conversions will require close attention since their product is just so far superior to SQL Server in so many ways.
Yes, Bill can really turn heads when he wants, but I'm not shure that security really matters to MS's consumers. A strong case can be made that focusing on security is a bad buisness decission.
Anyway, if MS makes it's software more secure what have they gained? Shure, they have wiped out the super expencive compeditors like Oracle, but these people focus on a minority market. I don't think killing a few compeditors in the server industry is worth the money.
Ok, lets focus on your classic security companies like Stmmantec and McAfee. Clearly, MS gains by entering this market with stand alone products which it can sell to the truely security minded, but I think the competition would be fierce, for a small market.
Ok, MS descideds it wants to win so it bundles a virus scanner with Windows. Big mistake! MS could afford to lose the revenue stream from IE since IE had amazing leveraging potential. Virus scaners just don't offer that potential. MS has killed their compeditors by wiping out the market, so no one makes any money. Built in security features are even less profitable since you can't sell them seperatly.
Ultimatly, I just don't think security is profitable unless you are selling it only to the people who care. The majority do not care about security so you need to sell cheap security and then you lose the revenue from the people who were willing to pay through the nose.
Bill is a control freak so he would never do this, but I think MS's best bet security wize would be to lissence Oracle, Symmantec, etc. to create their own secured versions of Windows.. with the requirment that (a) all rights revered to MS within 3 years, (b) they had to charge full sticker price for the modified Windows (i.e. no OEM version), and (c) MS got most of the money anyway. The paranoid security folks would get their product (whose biggest feature would be disabling stuff by default), MS would be protected from anti-trust laws, and MS would walk away with the cash, rights, and market leverage.
No, patents do not exist to protect your idea no matter what people tell you. The Law dose not and should not give a shit about your idea. Patents exist solely to protect the capital involved in bringing a product to market, i.e. they should provent a large company from simply copying a small companies product.
Alternativly, Windows could end up losing market share if security paranoid foreigners (who are not a valuble market because they would pirate Windows anyway) choose to run a more secure operating system.
Actually, I do think that there should be some form of product liability, but it could come in the form of inshurance companies saing "We will stand by the security of this product." The question is do you force all consumers to pay for product liability by making the company pay for it. I could see Norton, RedHat, and MS making money as financial institutions this way if the inshurance was optional.
I was an undergrad at Georgia Tech and you *never* *ever* had bandwidth consumption problems unless you were really insane (at one point one guy was using 60% of the schools bandwidth to run a pirate site and he got cought). Georgia Tech just had a lot of bandwidth because they knew tehy needed it.
Anyway, I expect that almost all Tech schools have reasonable notions about bandwidth consumption. There is a very good reason for this: Tech schools know that every single person is going to use a lot of bandwidth, so they provide the necissary amounts inb the first place. Your average university which just installed dorm networking is tring to bullshit themselves into believing that only a handful of people actually use the network.
Anyway, I do not think dorm bandwidth should play a huge role in your college decissions. Still, bandwidth is a better reason then football to pick a school, so I say most people should at least find out how much bandwidth the school offers prior to attending. I would say a more importent point is that bandwidth and computer policy *may* be indicative of other administrative issues and you sould pay attention to the over all administrative picture.
I can tell you Georgia Tech is an absolutly great school in terms of computer policy (and administration). Georgia Tech students complain a lot, but they are pretty much full of shit. Actually, the *only* real problem I can remember at Georgica Tech was the coop office's power trip issues, but who would ever want to coop anyway.. it's a waist of time.
I can also tell you that Rutgers has one of the worst administrations I could imagine (without going to some psycho religious school or some place with specific serious rights problems). The rutgers dorm networking is absolute crap and they have insanely small quotas which essentually enshure that you will not use the network for anything interesting. I've never been stopped for it, but the quotas are technically too small to DL a RedHat CD.
btw> I do like Rutgers as a grad school since I like the department and my advisor, but I hate dealing with the rutgers administration and I can see undergrads having very serious problems (since they deal more directly with the administration).
You don't need to kick users off. You just need to make the contributing users get some side benifits.
Example: more and more people are having upload quotas imposed on them (say via dorm networking). You could make the P2P software respect this to make it easier for these epople to contribute, but also make it reserve much of the upload quota for people who have contributed in the past. Thus contributing users would have a much easier time downloading things.
Actually, this article is very realevent to a weblog. You can give the paying members extra power and resistance from punnishment impossed by others. K5's Scoop is currently the best weblog software that I know about (slash sucks majorly), so lets use it as an example. Under scoop you could give paying members the following bonuses without messing up the works too much:
1) Ability to read invisible posts (posts rated below 1).
2) Your own posts do not become invisible until (a) they have been rated below 0.5 (instead of 1) and (b) they have at least 3 zero ratings.
3) You get trusted user access easier (ability to rate posts as zero).
4) Your story submissions have an easier time getting posted.
5) Your votes on story submissions count as two or three votes.
You might even give them a little more editorial power, like the abiltiy to delete their own comments.
Anyway, none of these things are two extream, but they might be enough to get some subscribers.
Big buisness took over the world once before and they were partially driven back by the unionists, enviromentalists and fair competition people. We are experencing buisness's second wave. I do believe that there will be a major responce, but I don't know how bad things will get before it happens.
Ultimatly, big buisness and big government translate into additional layers of managment and additional costs to consumers. At least part of our long term problem is the "bickering" between lefty and righty "smallness" advocates. Neither side understands that *managment* is fundamentally bad, wether it's big government managment, big buisness managment, or layers of lawyers. Instead, the smallness side fights over stupid little details like socialism vs. capitalism (it dose not help that they are extreamists either).
The libertarian party is pretty much an irrational bunch of idealistic lunatics.. many third parties have this problem. We just all notice the party when someone importent and sane joins (like Nadar & the greens).
Anyway, the Libertarian party would never support half the ideas which it's philosophy implies, like say eliminating limited liability for corperations stock holders. There is a very ghood reason for this: the entire libertarian ideology has been hijact by corperate lobiests.
This is quite unfortunatly because we need a market like awairness to construct the kinds of checks and balances needed to fix many of todays problems.
Example: The government and regulated monopolies never lower prices. It's just not possible. Deregulation is the only real hope for lower prices. Execpt for some stupid reason legislatures seem to lissen to the degregulation lobbiests paid by the current monopolies. Duh! Idiots. The guys who want this *should* be losing money in any good deregulation scheme.
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Amen! There is a quote in some anti-GM food screed I read which said "We are not affraid of making new mistakes (viruses, etc.), we are affraid of perfecting old ones."
There are a few subtile Health risks assosiated to GM crops, but I think we should accept these risks. The real threat comes in the form of a threat to bio-diversity. Your comment about the Irish potatoe famine is right on. What happens when some bug desides that Roundup ready is lunch time. Will if only corn is Roundup ready then we don't eat corn. If all our staples are Roundup ready then we starve. With a little luck this will hit about 3 years after the baby boomers create a second great depression by retiring..:)
I think the solution is to make all farm subsadies based on biodiversity, i.e. you recieve zero if 30%+ of the crop (corn, etc.) grown by U.S. farmers is of the same genetic background. This would both prevent monopolies in the GM food buisness and enshure that there were profit margins for Organic foods.
MON is looks like a good day trading stocks this year. Specifically, It seems highly cyclical with a very short cycle. It's still on the decreasing part of the cycle, so you might still manage to short it (or sell it god forbid you own it). If I cared to day trade this I would go look at how GE preformed during it's PCB issues (course GE poluted something lots of people care about).
Anyway, I feal that some limited ammount of polution problems like this are acceptable as "growing pains," *but* the additude of corperate America towards these sorts of problems is truely dispicable. "we did a studdy and surpressed the results" or "we choose not to do a studdy because we knew what the resutls would be" are totally unacceptable behaviors. The natural deduction is that corperations are simply not being held sufficently accountable, but I think this could be incorect. People, not faceless abstractions, are making these decissions. The problem is that the faceless abstraction, and not the people, are being held accountable. Here are two proposals:
1) Make is easyer to throw corperate executives in jail for "statistical manslaughter," i.e. shortening a number of people's lives.
2) Remove the limited liability for shareholders, i.e. corperations would issue a one share "liability dividend" for each share of voting stock; these liability shares could be traded on the open market, but they would caust money to get rid of; those holding the liability shares for the relevent years get tagged for all clean up expences. Alternativly, you could just remember who voted that years and tag those people for the cost of the clean up (people who voted would buy inshurance). Anyway, the point is that share holders would get used to seeing the financial fall out of ignoring their companies enviromental policy.
If you machines are so great then there would be no big corperations necissary to make the next cool gizmo. You would just pay academics out of your taxes to produce an unending stream of crazy ideas and there would be some more rational individuals, say academics or the great great intelectual heir to Linus (i.e. just some guy having fun), who would turn these ideas into something practical.
There would be big corperations but they would be in the buisness of *testing* not building. Heck, big pharma companies now get their ideas for free from the NIH and spend a 1/2 billion dollars getting FDA approval. If these companies got no IP & made no drugs then they would mearly test and charge the doctors for the results of their test.. you would pay the doctors for that same data in a processed form.
My point is almost all the money is spent in the testing not the designing.. especially after your everything is cheap to make assumption. Software is cheap now because we do not need to do any significant testing.. we can always fix it later.. at least if you do not mind a few virii.
Now you would still need mega corps to produce things like space planes, but that was not your question.
No the autoupdater will fix this one, but the real problem is that any middle eazstern millionare can use money to find his own private bug that will *never* turn up on CERT. He just needs to higher a number of hackers give them the pirated Windows (shared) source. Actually, they do not even need the source since this type of bug should be very prevelent.
MSFT should be required to recall XP and fix as many simillar bugs as possible, likely a year or more. I think Linux has done this.
These kinds of buffer overflow exploits are common theam of any binary distribtions. I think Linux had many such exploits in the past, but the Linux kernel hackers responce was to run around placing bounds checks all over the place.. MSFT's responce is to send out a patch for the specific overflow when discovered. I expect that these will be an almost perminent feature of Windows.
The real problem is that someone who want their own personal admin exploit for Windows can just go spend a few million bucks to find one. It should be years before the stupid hacker kids manage to find it. This should work for Linux too, but you will not get as many years before the bug gets fixed since Linux tends to fix many simillar bugs at once.
I think we have diffrent takes on "cool new ideas." There are big, middle, and small new ideas. The big ideas are things like Tetris style puzzle games, FPSs (Doom), Flight Sims, RTS, massivly multiplayer RPGs (Ultima Online), Sim games, and many more. With the exception of tetris style puzzle games, these all took many years to come out for the concoles, if they are out at all.
Yes, the PCs have a million implementations of each of these, but this results in a very good "best" version. Halo is no cooler then Quake.. Counter Strike is far far better then either.
Actually, MGS2 sounds pretty cool. It's basically a fusion of Counter Strike and Tomb Raider right? I assume that you have control over your viewing perspective right? I would suggest that the FPS and Tomb raider classes of games are obsolete and we will only see mixed perspectives from now on. It just dose not work to climb in FPSs and Tomb Raider style can not shoot. The PCs are behind in good mixed perspective games, but I would not expect this to last long. Within a year, there will be PC games (an heir to Counter Strike) which beat the pants off MGS2.. especially in the only place where it counts: multiplayer.
I smell a PC gamer who is pissed at the concoles stealing his platforms thunder. No worries man, the PC game scene will *always* be inifintly superior to the concole game scene:
1) PC games & hardware upgrades are cheaper then concoles (assuming you would need some kind of crappy computer for work or school anyway).
2) PCs are inherently better suited to online gaming communities (no changing the CD to use the web browser; no special hardware for cool new features like voice over IP carried with a game).
3) The PCs get both the "cool new ideas" (Doom, Descent, WarCraft, Sims, Ultima Online) and the best versions available (Counter Strike, WarCraft 3, etc.)
Now, Nintendo is unique because they actually manage to beat the PC at #3 with a few games per concole. There will be a number of rich geeks who just gota have one or two Nintendo games. Who gives a shit about Halo when you got Counter Strike?
Finally, the PS2 is really designed to capture the "we can not afford a computer or DVD player" market, so it should continue to sell well. I have no idea why the Xbox is targeted at this market and has video hardware which requires and HDTV to see the effects.
I agree totally. Academics may support open/free software and academics create free spftware, but the most popular free software projects today are just (higher quality) rip offs of well know commercial projects.. with the one execption of emacs and it's hardly new today.
Heck, popular free software dose not even copy good academic projects because the author is not really up to date on hot research. I would say that Jobbs is the most likely person to deploy a real new idea today.. and his are not even noticed by the main stream geek culture. Microsoft has firmly staked a claim to buzzword compliance and Linux seems happy to adopt the buzzwords too, but that hardly counts as innovative new technology.
I have just one question: Why should I buy an Xbox over a GeForce3? Even supposing I have an HDTV, what games dose the Xbox offer that PCs do not? Halo seems vastly inferior to CounterStrike and WarCraft 3 is on the way.
Converting PC gamers seems like a big mistake to me. They all have bad ass monitors, 1GHz+ CPUs, 512+ MB ram (oftin DDR), and bad ass sound cards. Hell, the system I describe is most likely superior to the *next* generation of consoles (with a video card upgrade). Plus, PC gamers have established online gaming communities.
Now, if you just have tons of money (perhaps most HDTV owners) and want to play every FPS then go buy yourself an Xbox and a GameCube. I'm shure you have a PS2 in the closet anyway. Why is your PS2 in the closet? Because, like every console game system ever made, it's graphics hardware was out of date (realitive to PCs) after you purchased it. The Xbox will be no exception.
If you own a PC and live on a budget, focus your gaming money at your PC. If do not own a PC and live on a really tight budget, the PS2 price will drop after Xmas, the PS2 games are cheaper, the PS2 is a DVD player, and all the experts are saying that the PS2 will have vastly more games.
BTW> If I had the money for an HDTV, I'd buy a 21' monitor, so the whole thing is pretty much a moot point anyway.
No, the market is not necissarily correct now. I bought into the market hard core post Sept. 21st bottom, but I do think the valuations are still out of wack. Bonds are 5%, the S&P 500's P/E is 27, and most of the stocks I've looked at have 1.5% yield, so stocks need 3.5% growth to tie bonds and I'm not shure the P/Es can support it.
LNUX it's self looks over valued at $2. There should be turn around plays with fractional price/cash ratios. LNUX needs reverse splits to give room to fall without being delisted.
Buffet thinks we will see 6% or 7% outa stocks for the next 10 years and he knows what he's talking about, but +1.5% above bonds is not enough for fixed income people to justify holding stocks IMHO.
Ironies. Here is an interview with an Excel team leader guy who claims that the biggest mistake a software company can make is rewriting it's product: http://www.softwaremarketsolution.com/
I wonder what this says about Windows NT, 2000, & XP. Here are good excerps where he pseudo-insults programmers:
SMS: Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit?
Joel: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuild from ground zero.
SMS: Uh, what's wrong with that?
Joel: Because it's almost never true. It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it.
SMS: Well, why do programmers constantly go charging into management's offices claiming the existing code base is junk and has to be replaced?
Joel: My theory is that this happens because it's harder to read code than to write it. A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
SMS: Well, let's assume some of your top programmers walked in the door and said "we absolutely have to rewrite this thing from scratch, top to bottom." What's the right response?
Joel: What I learned from Charles Ferguson's great book (High St@kes, No Prisoners) is that you have to hire programmers who can understand the business goals. People who can answer questions like: "What does it really cost the company if we rewrite?" "How many months will it delay shipping the product?" "Will we sell enough marginal copies to justify the lost time and market share?" If your programmer insists on a rewrite, they probably don't understand the financials of the company, or the competitive situation. Explain this to them. Then get an honest estimate for the rewrite effort and insist on a financial spreadsheet showing a detailed cost/benefit analysis for the rewrite.
SMS: Yeah, great, but, believe it or not, programmers have been known to, uh, "shave the truth" when it comes to such matters.
Joel: What you're seeing is the famous programmer tactic: all features that I want take 1 hour, all features that I don't want take 99 years. If you suspect you are being lied to, just drill down. Get a schedule with granularity measured in hours, not months. Insist that each task have an estimate that is two days or less. If it's longer than that, you need to break it down into sub-tasks or the schedule can't be realistic.
I keep a copy of Windows 98 around for Starcraft (Wine broke it and needs Windows DLLS to work) and free long distance via dialpad (non-existant now), but my friends claim that windows 2000 is the best product MS has ever (or will ever) release. I assume Wine prefers Windows 98 DLLs to Windows 2000 libraries, but I will switch to Windows 2000 when I hear Wine likes it.
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AOl may not have any idea what they want to do with all those companies, but they know they do not want Microsoft to get em'. AOL & MS are both bad news.
Seriously, all those companies have significant leveraging potential (execpt maybe RedHat) but AOL is not in a position to use it. AOL can try to take MS if it aquires RedHat and merges with Apple, but my money would be on MS. The truth is that AOL has two types of executives, experenced TimeWarner folks and AOL nimrods. As much as I'd love to see Mac and Linux eat into MS's market share, TW's TV program directors are not going to be able to do it.
OTOH, AOL can keep RedHat on a leash (limit the desktop) to buy favors from MS. It violates anti-trust law, but they would get away with it.
..that they will go away if congress dose not pass this law? :)
It seems like most of your compile time changes are really the decission on the distribution (slang vs. ncurses).. and they are not going to be choices in this new Linux distribution either.
Plus, if your really stripping postgre support from the binary what happens when you latter want to install postgre? Shure, your not going to be installing postgre later if it's a server, but you might be installing postgre if it's your desktop.
Clearly, there is a market for an opimized server distribution, but flexibility is more importent in a desktop distribution. RedHat could just fork it's AMD and Intel distributions to get most of the benifits of opimizing.
Dispite all the slashbot nay sayer you are correct that MS *could* fix their security if they wanted, but I don;t believe you when you say that lack of security is costing them money. Care to provide an anrgument for those lost customers? Or perhaps reply to my other post where I claim that lack of security is not costing them customers.
As I see it Linux and Secure BSD conversions do not count since Linux is not that secure without a good admin and Secure BSD users are so paranoid that they would not run anything else anyway. You really should be looking at Mac and Oracle conversions.. and counting Oracle conversions will require close attention since their product is just so far superior to SQL Server in so many ways.
Yes, Bill can really turn heads when he wants, but I'm not shure that security really matters to MS's consumers. A strong case can be made that focusing on security is a bad buisness decission.
Anyway, if MS makes it's software more secure what have they gained? Shure, they have wiped out the super expencive compeditors like Oracle, but these people focus on a minority market. I don't think killing a few compeditors in the server industry is worth the money.
Ok, lets focus on your classic security companies like Stmmantec and McAfee. Clearly, MS gains by entering this market with stand alone products which it can sell to the truely security minded, but I think the competition would be fierce, for a small market.
Ok, MS descideds it wants to win so it bundles a virus scanner with Windows. Big mistake! MS could afford to lose the revenue stream from IE since IE had amazing leveraging potential. Virus scaners just don't offer that potential. MS has killed their compeditors by wiping out the market, so no one makes any money. Built in security features are even less profitable since you can't sell them seperatly.
Ultimatly, I just don't think security is profitable unless you are selling it only to the people who care. The majority do not care about security so you need to sell cheap security and then you lose the revenue from the people who were willing to pay through the nose.
Bill is a control freak so he would never do this, but I think MS's best bet security wize would be to lissence Oracle, Symmantec, etc. to create their own secured versions of Windows.. with the requirment that (a) all rights revered to MS within 3 years, (b) they had to charge full sticker price for the modified Windows (i.e. no OEM version), and (c) MS got most of the money anyway. The paranoid security folks would get their product (whose biggest feature would be disabling stuff by default), MS would be protected from anti-trust laws, and MS would walk away with the cash, rights, and market leverage.
No, patents do not exist to protect your idea no matter what people tell you. The Law dose not and should not give a shit about your idea. Patents exist solely to protect the capital involved in bringing a product to market, i.e. they should provent a large company from simply copying a small companies product.
Alternativly, Windows could end up losing market share if security paranoid foreigners (who are not a valuble market because they would pirate Windows anyway) choose to run a more secure operating system.
Actually, I do think that there should be some form of product liability, but it could come in the form of inshurance companies saing "We will stand by the security of this product." The question is do you force all consumers to pay for product liability by making the company pay for it. I could see Norton, RedHat, and MS making money as financial institutions this way if the inshurance was optional.
Can I get one with a Devo hat built in?
I was an undergrad at Georgia Tech and you *never* *ever* had bandwidth consumption problems unless you were really insane (at one point one guy was using 60% of the schools bandwidth to run a pirate site and he got cought). Georgia Tech just had a lot of bandwidth because they knew tehy needed it.
Anyway, I expect that almost all Tech schools have reasonable notions about bandwidth consumption. There is a very good reason for this: Tech schools know that every single person is going to use a lot of bandwidth, so they provide the necissary amounts inb the first place. Your average university which just installed dorm networking is tring to bullshit themselves into believing that only a handful of people actually use the network.
Anyway, I do not think dorm bandwidth should play a huge role in your college decissions. Still, bandwidth is a better reason then football to pick a school, so I say most people should at least find out how much bandwidth the school offers prior to attending. I would say a more importent point is that bandwidth and computer policy *may* be indicative of other administrative issues and you sould pay attention to the over all administrative picture.
I can tell you Georgia Tech is an absolutly great school in terms of computer policy (and administration). Georgia Tech students complain a lot, but they are pretty much full of shit. Actually, the *only* real problem I can remember at Georgica Tech was the coop office's power trip issues, but who would ever want to coop anyway.. it's a waist of time.
I can also tell you that Rutgers has one of the worst administrations I could imagine (without going to some psycho religious school or some place with specific serious rights problems). The rutgers dorm networking is absolute crap and they have insanely small quotas which essentually enshure that you will not use the network for anything interesting. I've never been stopped for it, but the quotas are technically too small to DL a RedHat CD.
btw> I do like Rutgers as a grad school since I like the department and my advisor, but I hate dealing with the rutgers administration and I can see undergrads having very serious problems (since they deal more directly with the administration).
You don't need to kick users off. You just need to make the contributing users get some side benifits.
Example: more and more people are having upload quotas imposed on them (say via dorm networking). You could make the P2P software respect this to make it easier for these epople to contribute, but also make it reserve much of the upload quota for people who have contributed in the past. Thus contributing users would have a much easier time downloading things.
Actually, this article is very realevent to a weblog. You can give the paying members extra power and resistance from punnishment impossed by others. K5's Scoop is currently the best weblog software that I know about (slash sucks majorly), so lets use it as an example. Under scoop you could give paying members the following bonuses without messing up the works too much:
1) Ability to read invisible posts (posts rated below 1).
2) Your own posts do not become invisible until (a) they have been rated below 0.5 (instead of 1) and (b) they have at least 3 zero ratings.
3) You get trusted user access easier (ability to rate posts as zero).
4) Your story submissions have an easier time getting posted.
5) Your votes on story submissions count as two or three votes.
You might even give them a little more editorial power, like the abiltiy to delete their own comments.
Anyway, none of these things are two extream, but they might be enough to get some subscribers.
Big buisness took over the world once before and they were partially driven back by the unionists, enviromentalists and fair competition people. We are experencing buisness's second wave. I do believe that there will be a major responce, but I don't know how bad things will get before it happens.
Ultimatly, big buisness and big government translate into additional layers of managment and additional costs to consumers. At least part of our long term problem is the "bickering" between lefty and righty "smallness" advocates. Neither side understands that *managment* is fundamentally bad, wether it's big government managment, big buisness managment, or layers of lawyers. Instead, the smallness side fights over stupid little details like socialism vs. capitalism (it dose not help that they are extreamists either).
The libertarian party is pretty much an irrational bunch of idealistic lunatics.. many third parties have this problem. We just all notice the party when someone importent and sane joins (like Nadar & the greens).
Anyway, the Libertarian party would never support half the ideas which it's philosophy implies, like say eliminating limited liability for corperations stock holders. There is a very ghood reason for this: the entire libertarian ideology has been hijact by corperate lobiests.
This is quite unfortunatly because we need a market like awairness to construct the kinds of checks and balances needed to fix many of todays problems.
Example: The government and regulated monopolies never lower prices. It's just not possible. Deregulation is the only real hope for lower prices. Execpt for some stupid reason legislatures seem to lissen to the degregulation lobbiests paid by the current monopolies. Duh! Idiots. The guys who want this *should* be losing money in any good deregulation scheme.
Amen! There is a quote in some anti-GM food screed I read which said "We are not affraid of making new mistakes (viruses, etc.), we are affraid of perfecting old ones."
:)
There are a few subtile Health risks assosiated to GM crops, but I think we should accept these risks. The real threat comes in the form of a threat to bio-diversity. Your comment about the Irish potatoe famine is right on. What happens when some bug desides that Roundup ready is lunch time. Will if only corn is Roundup ready then we don't eat corn. If all our staples are Roundup ready then we starve. With a little luck this will hit about 3 years after the baby boomers create a second great depression by retiring..
I think the solution is to make all farm subsadies based on biodiversity, i.e. you recieve zero if 30%+ of the crop (corn, etc.) grown by U.S. farmers is of the same genetic background. This would both prevent monopolies in the GM food buisness and enshure that there were profit margins for Organic foods.
MON is looks like a good day trading stocks this year. Specifically, It seems highly cyclical with a very short cycle. It's still on the decreasing part of the cycle, so you might still manage to short it (or sell it god forbid you own it). If I cared to day trade this I would go look at how GE preformed during it's PCB issues (course GE poluted something lots of people care about).
Anyway, I feal that some limited ammount of polution problems like this are acceptable as "growing pains," *but* the additude of corperate America towards these sorts of problems is truely dispicable. "we did a studdy and surpressed the results" or "we choose not to do a studdy because we knew what the resutls would be" are totally unacceptable behaviors. The natural deduction is that corperations are simply not being held sufficently accountable, but I think this could be incorect. People, not faceless abstractions, are making these decissions. The problem is that the faceless abstraction, and not the people, are being held accountable. Here are two proposals:
1) Make is easyer to throw corperate executives in jail for "statistical manslaughter," i.e. shortening a number of people's lives.
2) Remove the limited liability for shareholders, i.e. corperations would issue a one share "liability dividend" for each share of voting stock; these liability shares could be traded on the open market, but they would caust money to get rid of; those holding the liability shares for the relevent years get tagged for all clean up expences. Alternativly, you could just remember who voted that years and tag those people for the cost of the clean up (people who voted would buy inshurance). Anyway, the point is that share holders would get used to seeing the financial fall out of ignoring their companies enviromental policy.
If you machines are so great then there would be no big corperations necissary to make the next cool gizmo. You would just pay academics out of your taxes to produce an unending stream of crazy ideas and there would be some more rational individuals, say academics or the great great intelectual heir to Linus (i.e. just some guy having fun), who would turn these ideas into something practical.
There would be big corperations but they would be in the buisness of *testing* not building. Heck, big pharma companies now get their ideas for free from the NIH and spend a 1/2 billion dollars getting FDA approval. If these companies got no IP & made no drugs then they would mearly test and charge the doctors for the results of their test.. you would pay the doctors for that same data in a processed form.
My point is almost all the money is spent in the testing not the designing.. especially after your everything is cheap to make assumption. Software is cheap now because we do not need to do any significant testing.. we can always fix it later.. at least if you do not mind a few virii.
Now you would still need mega corps to produce things like space planes, but that was not your question.
No the autoupdater will fix this one, but the real problem is that any middle eazstern millionare can use money to find his own private bug that will *never* turn up on CERT. He just needs to higher a number of hackers give them the pirated Windows (shared) source. Actually, they do not even need the source since this type of bug should be very prevelent.
MSFT should be required to recall XP and fix as many simillar bugs as possible, likely a year or more. I think Linux has done this.
These kinds of buffer overflow exploits are common theam of any binary distribtions. I think Linux had many such exploits in the past, but the Linux kernel hackers responce was to run around placing bounds checks all over the place.. MSFT's responce is to send out a patch for the specific overflow when discovered. I expect that these will be an almost perminent feature of Windows.
The real problem is that someone who want their own personal admin exploit for Windows can just go spend a few million bucks to find one. It should be years before the stupid hacker kids manage to find it. This should work for Linux too, but you will not get as many years before the bug gets fixed since Linux tends to fix many simillar bugs at once.
I think we have diffrent takes on "cool new ideas." There are big, middle, and small new ideas. The big ideas are things like Tetris style puzzle games, FPSs (Doom), Flight Sims, RTS, massivly multiplayer RPGs (Ultima Online), Sim games, and many more. With the exception of tetris style puzzle games, these all took many years to come out for the concoles, if they are out at all.
Yes, the PCs have a million implementations of each of these, but this results in a very good "best" version. Halo is no cooler then Quake.. Counter Strike is far far better then either.
Actually, MGS2 sounds pretty cool. It's basically a fusion of Counter Strike and Tomb Raider right? I assume that you have control over your viewing perspective right? I would suggest that the FPS and Tomb raider classes of games are obsolete and we will only see mixed perspectives from now on. It just dose not work to climb in FPSs and Tomb Raider style can not shoot. The PCs are behind in good mixed perspective games, but I would not expect this to last long. Within a year, there will be PC games (an heir to Counter Strike) which beat the pants off MGS2.. especially in the only place where it counts: multiplayer.
I smell a PC gamer who is pissed at the concoles stealing his platforms thunder. No worries man, the PC game scene will *always* be inifintly superior to the concole game scene:
1) PC games & hardware upgrades are cheaper then concoles (assuming you would need some kind of crappy computer for work or school anyway).
2) PCs are inherently better suited to online gaming communities (no changing the CD to use the web browser; no special hardware for cool new features like voice over IP carried with a game).
3) The PCs get both the "cool new ideas" (Doom, Descent, WarCraft, Sims, Ultima Online) and the best versions available (Counter Strike, WarCraft 3, etc.)
Now, Nintendo is unique because they actually manage to beat the PC at #3 with a few games per concole. There will be a number of rich geeks who just gota have one or two Nintendo games. Who gives a shit about Halo when you got Counter Strike?
Finally, the PS2 is really designed to capture the "we can not afford a computer or DVD player" market, so it should continue to sell well. I have no idea why the Xbox is targeted at this market and has video hardware which requires and HDTV to see the effects.
I agree totally. Academics may support open/free software and academics create free spftware, but the most popular free software projects today are just (higher quality) rip offs of well know commercial projects.. with the one execption of emacs and it's hardly new today.
Heck, popular free software dose not even copy good academic projects because the author is not really up to date on hot research. I would say that Jobbs is the most likely person to deploy a real new idea today.. and his are not even noticed by the main stream geek culture. Microsoft has firmly staked a claim to buzzword compliance and Linux seems happy to adopt the buzzwords too, but that hardly counts as innovative new technology.
I have just one question: Why should I buy an Xbox over a GeForce3? Even supposing I have an HDTV, what games dose the Xbox offer that PCs do not? Halo seems vastly inferior to CounterStrike and WarCraft 3 is on the way.
Converting PC gamers seems like a big mistake to me. They all have bad ass monitors, 1GHz+ CPUs, 512+ MB ram (oftin DDR), and bad ass sound cards. Hell, the system I describe is most likely superior to the *next* generation of consoles (with a video card upgrade). Plus, PC gamers have established online gaming communities.
Now, if you just have tons of money (perhaps most HDTV owners) and want to play every FPS then go buy yourself an Xbox and a GameCube. I'm shure you have a PS2 in the closet anyway. Why is your PS2 in the closet? Because, like every console game system ever made, it's graphics hardware was out of date (realitive to PCs) after you purchased it. The Xbox will be no exception.
If you own a PC and live on a budget, focus your gaming money at your PC. If do not own a PC and live on a really tight budget, the PS2 price will drop after Xmas, the PS2 games are cheaper, the PS2 is a DVD player, and all the experts are saying that the PS2 will have vastly more games.
BTW> If I had the money for an HDTV, I'd buy a 21' monitor, so the whole thing is pretty much a moot point anyway.
No, the market is not necissarily correct now. I bought into the market hard core post Sept. 21st bottom, but I do think the valuations are still out of wack. Bonds are 5%, the S&P 500's P/E is 27, and most of the stocks I've looked at have 1.5% yield, so stocks need 3.5% growth to tie bonds and I'm not shure the P/Es can support it.
LNUX it's self looks over valued at $2. There should be turn around plays with fractional price/cash ratios. LNUX needs reverse splits to give room to fall without being delisted.
Buffet thinks we will see 6% or 7% outa stocks for the next 10 years and he knows what he's talking about, but +1.5% above bonds is not enough for fixed income people to justify holding stocks IMHO.
Ironies. Here is an interview with an Excel team leader guy who claims that the biggest mistake a software company can make is rewriting it's product: http://www.softwaremarketsolution.com/
I wonder what this says about Windows NT, 2000, & XP. Here are good excerps where he pseudo-insults programmers:
SMS: Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit?
Joel: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuild from ground zero.
SMS: Uh, what's wrong with that?
Joel: Because it's almost never true. It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it.
SMS: Well, why do programmers constantly go charging into management's offices claiming the existing code base is junk and has to be replaced?
Joel: My theory is that this happens because it's harder to read code than to write it. A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
SMS: Well, let's assume some of your top programmers walked in the door and said "we absolutely have to rewrite this thing from scratch, top to bottom." What's the right response?
Joel: What I learned from Charles Ferguson's great book (High St@kes, No Prisoners) is that you have to hire programmers who can understand the business goals. People who can answer questions like: "What does it really cost the company if we rewrite?" "How many months will it delay shipping the product?" "Will we sell enough marginal copies to justify the lost time and market share?" If your programmer insists on a rewrite, they probably don't understand the financials of the company, or the competitive situation. Explain this to them. Then get an honest estimate for the rewrite effort and insist on a financial spreadsheet showing a detailed cost/benefit analysis for the rewrite.
SMS: Yeah, great, but, believe it or not, programmers have been known to, uh, "shave the truth" when it comes to such matters.
Joel: What you're seeing is the famous programmer tactic: all features that I want take 1 hour, all features that I don't want take 99 years. If you suspect you are being lied to, just drill down. Get a schedule with granularity measured in hours, not months. Insist that each task have an estimate that is two days or less. If it's longer than that, you need to break it down into sub-tasks or the schedule can't be realistic.
I keep a copy of Windows 98 around for Starcraft (Wine broke it and needs Windows DLLS to work) and free long distance via dialpad (non-existant now), but my friends claim that windows 2000 is the best product MS has ever (or will ever) release. I assume Wine prefers Windows 98 DLLs to Windows 2000 libraries, but I will switch to Windows 2000 when I hear Wine likes it.