I'm wondering if there's a list somewhere, and whether it includes the one near my office, from whence they're supposed to be installing my 1.5Mbit SDSL link tomorrow. Sheesh, this doesn't sound good. --
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
I'm starting to think that T1 ought to be dirt cheap, at least cheaper than 2Mbps DSL. The tech is as old as the hills and the equipment to support it at high densities should be at least as cheap as DSL if not cheaper. The local loop will probably never be cheap, but at least the net connection ought to be.
A friend pointed out to me today as I was whining about this exact thing that at least our local ILEC (Bellsouth, yuck, ptooey!) is tariffed, so they don't really have much choice in the matter of what they charge for a T-1.
I was wondering - is this true, and if so, does anyone have any actual experience in lobbying their local Public Service Commission to lower a specific service tariff rate?
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
Perhaps it's auto-directed to the destination
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
I'm thinking of how you'd connect Jobs and Bezos to a transportation device, and it occurs to me: Amazon will want to sell them, and Jobs will want to put computers in them. Because...
Imagine this: You go to your web site, select your destinations in the city (work, store, cheese shop, etc.). You get into the cool little pod, it whisks you away to your destination. Along the way, you browse the web, send/receive email, etc. It's a personal and configurable subway system.
That would be cool.:)
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
The GPL indeed wants to claim rights to code that merely links with GPL'ed software. While I understand the desire to do so, I think this sets a dangerous precedent because, in essence, it creates a notion of "API copyrights".
If the GPL can claim this, Sun could claim that any code that "references" or "links with" their Java APIs should fall under their license, [...] and Microsoft might claim it for Win32 (so much for Wine).
I don't believe this is true; the GPL does NOT prevent you from reverse-engineering a GPL library (wouldn't that be a strange twist) in order to make a closed-source one. Nor does it in any way exert rights over the API. It merely controls the use of the code.
In particular, Wine provides implementations of Micro$oft APIs that programs can link to and use, even though Micro$oft claims copyright for their binary DLLs (many of which they distribute for free-as-in-beer, but all of which are still copyrighted).
So there's already a pretty clearly understood separation between maintaining or enforcing usage restrictions on existing code or binaries, and the ability to reverse-engineer or emulate the APIs provided by those libraries. The GPL doesn't help or harm this situation.
I do understand the high P/E for growing companies and low P/E for troubled companies. Unfortunately, day-traders are screwing up P/E ratios for many high profile companies. No one is going to be able to convince me that Rambus is worth its 829 P/E or Yahoo worth its 1770 P/E. Rambus is at about 300 right now, and it was at 500 a couple of weeks ago! What the hell is up with that?
There are many factors that enter into these really historically staggering multiples for companies like Yahoo. But there's a great deal more market force at work here than can be attributed to the infamous "day traders". There really aren't many of them; multiples this high indicate either an extraordinary thin market (certainly not the case with typical Internet-related IPOs these days) or gargantuan institutional pressure. Folks, it takes massive, massive amounts of buying pressure to generate market caps like that.
So why do they do it? Who's pulling the trigger to continue buying into stock valuations that are this, well, nutty? First, I ain't Warren Buffet, so I don't claim to have all the answers. But there's a factor here that is working overtime to jack up these prices and keep them much higher than the current model of economics and business will support.
That is, simply, that there are a lot of people who suspect strongly that the current model is on its way out. Kaput. Done for. Over with. And in the Brave New World, who knows who will be on top? Thus, part of the reason people are thus placing what seem to be extraordinarily high bets on companies like Amazon and Yahoo (and Cisco and Micro$oft, while we're at it) is the presumption that these companies are going to be on top, however the New Economy ends up working.
That's why people are buying eyeballs at an exorbitant rate - they figure that, whatever else happens, you still gotta have loyal customers. So, since we don't know what the new model is going to look like, or who the real competitors are going to be, the only place to put your money if you want to play, is on the companies that own eyeballs.
Thus, taking the astonishing step of actually getting back to the original thread, I think they key to look at in an acquisition of a web site is whether or not the buyer is buying a current business (in which case, current business-model multiples and rules and so on apply, or should), or whether they're stocking up on ammo (eyeballs/users/views/loyalty/goodwill, as in the case of the Andover/. deal), in which case you can pretty much flush single-digit multiples and earnings and all of that right down the proverbial toilet.
Which brings us back to one thing that doesn't seem to change, no matter how many Industrial Revolutions we live through, and that is (as has already been pointed out in this thread) - there is no objective "worth"; you just gotta know how bad the buyer wants it. And knowing what he wants it for is critical in that determination.
What we need to do is set up a briefing packet for Congress. All of them. Discussions of the flaws in the DMCA, of UCITA, of the attacks on DeCSS and on anti-filtering. Logical, reasoned arguments against what's there already. Maybe sponsored by the EFF. Or a made-up think-tank with a grandiose title.
This falls under the "geeks just don't understand how to hack politics" thing, doesn't it? I think this is a great idea. Does anyone from the EFF read this? I wonder if they'd be interested. Does EFF even have a regular lobbying arm? Gotta go check on their web site...
Personally, I think that the Justice Department is just wasting time and money really pursuing this.
If you take the position (as I certainly do) that Micro$oft's business-as-usual practices harm consumers, then there's a very real case to be made that the mere trial activity itself has done a great deal of good over the past couple of years.
It seems apparent that Micro$oft has felt itself hampered from pursuing some options as aggressively as it would have preferred. Witness for instance the fact that Dell, Compaq, and Gateway are all shipping machines now without a scrap of Micro$oftware on them. Things have changed for the better, IMO, and regardless of the real verdict in this trial, it's been a worthwhile cause.
I personally would rather subsidize the electricity and not pay later at the grocery store, wouldn't you?
No, and here's the basic difference between those who have faith in the market and those who don't - I don't pretend, or trust anyone who pretends, to be able to predict these effects and head them off.
Thus, I think it's just in general a bad idea to attempt to tamper with a market when the outcome and effects thereof are unknown (which they pretty much always are).
Now, IANAL, but if I recall, the viral nature of the GPL does not extend outside the actual OS. Therefore, if an embedded systems developer makes a modification to the kernel, source must be made available. However, if other OS components are developed ground-up without GPL'd code, the rest of the system need not be placed under the GPL.
So can anyone 'splain to me whether a proprietary device driver that is implemented as a loadable module would or would not fall under the GPL?
Speaking of GPL and lawyers, does anyone know of any law firms which have specific experience related to GPL and similar licensing for tech companies? I'd like to find a law firm that I don't have to try to explain the whole concept to (and get billed for it), just to get them to help me answer some license questions similar to the one that started this thread.
I thought that the FSF long ago had a list of legal resources on their site for firms that were GPL-friendly or had experience in this, but I looked recently and couldn't find it.
Ha! First reply to my own message! Woo woo! Ahem. Sorry, got carried away there.
While it's not a web page, the NANOG mailing list (North American Network Operators Group or some such) at merit.edu gets a bunch of postings like this, close to when they happen, and mostly (it appears) from Sean Donelan at DRA in St. Louis. Dunno why, but he is very good about posting exactlythe sort of things you're asking about. The big drawbacks are that:
It's a mailing list, not a web page, and
It can be a chatty mailing list sometimes, particularly if the other operational info doesn't interest you so much.
But it's exactly the sort of thing you asked for, so I thought I'd mention it. You can subscribe by sending the standard "subscribe nanog" to majordomo@merit.edu.
Another interesting site is the Internet Weather Report. While it's got a tendency to produce some very large images, and it's a little hard to navigate, there are some really cool visual images of the Internet on there.
The GPL doesn't enslave people; it merely reduces their rights. It also claims that it's increasing people's freedom.
It lies.
I believe the misunderstanding here is over whose rights are at stake. The GPL explicitly protects the freedoms of users against a distributor or modifier of GPLed code exercising a perceived freedom of his own. Thus, for some people who would want to take GPLed code and make proprietary extensions or changes to it, yes, it's limiting. However, for the users of such code, it's freedom-expanding. It trades the freedom for one person to do a specific thing (make proprietary changes that aren't GPLed) for the freedom of many people to do a bunch of specific things (have the source code to make their own changes and mods to).
In the aggregate, it increases freedom. I do not believe that the GPL claims to "expand" an individual author's freedom with respect to an individual package that he's modified. It does claim to also help even the individual author in the same way it helps the rest of the computing public, by increasing the "aggregate" good. Thus, it does not lie, though you may disagree with whether such a goal is or is not noble.
The GPL doesn't enslave people; it merely reduces their rights. It also claims that it's increasing people's freedom.
It lies.
I believe the misunderstanding here is over whose rights are at stake. The GPL explicitly protects the freedoms of users against a distributor or modifier of GPLed code exercising a perceived freedom of his own. Thus, for some people who would want to take GPLed code and make proprietary extensions or changes to it, yes, it's limiting. However, for the users of such code, it's freedom-expanding. It trades the freedom for one person to do a specific thing (make proprietary changes that aren't GPLed) for the freedom of many people to do a bunch of specific things (have the source code to make their own changes and mods to).
In the aggregate, it increases freedom. I do not believe that the GPL claims to "expand" an individual author's freedom with respect to an individual package that he's modified. It does claim to also help even the individual author in the same way it helps the rest of the computing public, by increasing the "aggregate" good. Thus, it does not lie, though you may disagree with whether such a goal is or is not noble.
increases freedoms (over the standard proprietary licensing schemes) -- Ryan Waldron
And finally, I dislike the GPL. It has a VERY good goal; but its means to that end are repressive. I don't want my software free if it enslaves people.
As a slogan, this is catchy, but the problem is, the GPL does not enslave anyone. No one has to use it. The FSF/GPL project (personifying for a moment) is a merchant. It offers its goods (really cool software, source included) for a price: philosophical agreement on projects you derive from it.
That's not enslaving, because you have a *choice* whether to derive works from it. It may be seductive, enticing, tempting, annoying, exasperating, etc., but it's not enslaving.
-- Ryan Waldron
Has anyone gotten spreadsheets to work?
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 1
I have Office 97, downloaded the zip file, unpacked them, fired up the Weigtemp.xls file, and started getting a series of macro errors.
I know nothing about Excel macros, and really don't have a clue about where to start. It gives me the willies to think about learning a scripting "language" created in Redmond.
So I'm hoping that it's something simple that someone can tell me that instantly presto-change-o solves all my worries and allows me to get the cool exponentially smoothed weight graph.
I think worries over clone factories and governments using this "revolutionary" technique to stamp out zillions of genetically engineered soldiers misses one important fact - for every single cloned embryo, some woman has to carry that thing in her womb for most of the 9 months and then bear the child. And finding zillions of women willing (and able) to perform such a task for someone other than themselves or their families seems to me highly unlikely.
Cloning sheep is much easier because the ewe doesn't get much choice as to whether she gets impregnated by a scientist in the lab; she's just an animal. But I'm thinking that it ain't gonna go so well for a scientist who attempts to force that on a woman.
Cloning is merely a novel way of creating an embryo, as opposed to the more typical (and considerably more fun) method used heretofore. But it doesn't appear to me that there are any shortage of people willing to contribute to embryo-creation in the old-fashioned way, does it? The real trick, the one that would legitimately raise these questions about what governments and labs might do with them, is if someone figured out how to go from egg to full-term healthy baby without the participation of a female to carry it.
Until that happens, I'm mostly yawning about the "Brave New World" scenarios.
I agree that the article on Samba and NT interaction was good, but then, it was from one of our own, after all.
But did you read the hopelessly clueless little screed at the back from "Auntie M. Cee Pee"? Same trash as always - you can't use Linux if you don't know a bunch of arcane commands and a command line. Same old tired FUD at its worst.
What I wonder, for people who think that Un*x commands are arcane - have they ever tried to do any real performance tuning on NT? Talk about arcane...
Not at all! Communism and central planning are government-enforced things. Many people voluntarily contributing their own money toward causes they care about, administered through a non-governmental agency with specific goals and public accountability is not in the same universe as the failed ideologies you mention here.
Slashdot Mirror
She's got my vote. But more importantly, she's got my cash. She has an innocuous little "Donate here" PayPal link on the left side of the page.
If you appreciate what she's doing, and the incredible amount of time and precision and effort behind it, take a minute and make a donation.
I finally got off my behind today and dropped her a few dollars.
It appears that our Mr. Auman has some other ventures. This one, "The Music Man DJ Service", even has a picture of him:
http://www.musicman-dj.com/meetdj/default.asp
I'm assuming that this is the same Drew Auman, as they both operate out of Akron, OH.
They even have an 800 # - 800-717-1476
And OH! Is that a real phone # there at the bottom? I wonder if he's awake...
Make good off-site backups and take them to your house. :)
Because burning at the stake is frowned on these days, so converting the heathen is the only alternative.
I'm wondering if there's a list somewhere, and whether it includes the one near my office, from whence they're supposed to be installing my 1.5Mbit SDSL link tomorrow. Sheesh, this doesn't sound good.
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
A friend pointed out to me today as I was whining about this exact thing that at least our local ILEC (Bellsouth, yuck, ptooey!) is tariffed, so they don't really have much choice in the matter of what they charge for a T-1.
I was wondering - is this true, and if so, does anyone have any actual experience in lobbying their local Public Service Commission to lower a specific service tariff rate?
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
I'm thinking of how you'd connect Jobs and Bezos to a transportation device, and it occurs to me: Amazon will want to sell them, and Jobs will want to put computers in them. Because... Imagine this: You go to your web site, select your destinations in the city (work, store, cheese shop, etc.). You get into the cool little pod, it whisks you away to your destination. Along the way, you browse the web, send/receive email, etc. It's a personal and configurable subway system. That would be cool. :)
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
The GPL indeed wants to claim rights to code that merely links with GPL'ed software. While I understand the desire to do so, I think this sets a dangerous precedent because, in essence, it creates a notion of "API copyrights".
If the GPL can claim this, Sun could claim that any code that "references" or "links with" their Java APIs should fall under their license, [...] and Microsoft might claim it for Win32 (so much for Wine).
I don't believe this is true; the GPL does NOT prevent you from reverse-engineering a GPL library (wouldn't that be a strange twist) in order to make a closed-source one. Nor does it in any way exert rights over the API. It merely controls the use of the code.
In particular, Wine provides implementations of Micro$oft APIs that programs can link to and use, even though Micro$oft claims copyright for their binary DLLs (many of which they distribute for free-as-in-beer, but all of which are still copyrighted).
So there's already a pretty clearly understood separation between maintaining or enforcing usage restrictions on existing code or binaries, and the ability to reverse-engineer or emulate the APIs provided by those libraries. The GPL doesn't help or harm this situation.
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
I do understand the high P/E for growing companies and low P/E for troubled companies. Unfortunately, day-traders are screwing up P/E ratios for many high profile companies. No one is going to be able to convince me that Rambus is worth its 829 P/E or Yahoo worth its 1770 P/E. Rambus is at about 300 right now, and it was at 500 a couple of weeks ago! What the hell is up with that?
There are many factors that enter into these really historically staggering multiples for companies like Yahoo. But there's a great deal more market force at work here than can be attributed to the infamous "day traders". There really aren't many of them; multiples this high indicate either an extraordinary thin market (certainly not the case with typical Internet-related IPOs these days) or gargantuan institutional pressure. Folks, it takes massive, massive amounts of buying pressure to generate market caps like that.
So why do they do it? Who's pulling the trigger to continue buying into stock valuations that are this, well, nutty? First, I ain't Warren Buffet, so I don't claim to have all the answers. But there's a factor here that is working overtime to jack up these prices and keep them much higher than the current model of economics and business will support.
That is, simply, that there are a lot of people who suspect strongly that the current model is on its way out. Kaput. Done for. Over with. And in the Brave New World, who knows who will be on top? Thus, part of the reason people are thus placing what seem to be extraordinarily high bets on companies like Amazon and Yahoo (and Cisco and Micro$oft, while we're at it) is the presumption that these companies are going to be on top, however the New Economy ends up working.
That's why people are buying eyeballs at an exorbitant rate - they figure that, whatever else happens, you still gotta have loyal customers. So, since we don't know what the new model is going to look like, or who the real competitors are going to be, the only place to put your money if you want to play, is on the companies that own eyeballs.
Thus, taking the astonishing step of actually getting back to the original thread, I think they key to look at in an acquisition of a web site is whether or not the buyer is buying a current business (in which case, current business-model multiples and rules and so on apply, or should), or whether they're stocking up on ammo (eyeballs/users/views/loyalty/goodwill, as in the case of the Andover/. deal), in which case you can pretty much flush single-digit multiples and earnings and all of that right down the proverbial toilet.
Which brings us back to one thing that doesn't seem to change, no matter how many Industrial Revolutions we live through, and that is (as has already been pointed out in this thread) - there is no objective "worth"; you just gotta know how bad the buyer wants it. And knowing what he wants it for is critical in that determination.
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
What we need to do is set up a briefing packet for Congress. All of them. Discussions of the flaws in the DMCA, of UCITA, of the attacks on DeCSS and on anti-filtering. Logical, reasoned arguments against what's there already. Maybe sponsored by the EFF. Or a made-up think-tank with a grandiose title.
This falls under the "geeks just don't understand how to hack politics" thing, doesn't it? I think this is a great idea. Does anyone from the EFF read this? I wonder if they'd be interested. Does EFF even have a regular lobbying arm? Gotta go check on their web site...
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
Personally, I think that the Justice Department is just wasting time and money really pursuing this.
If you take the position (as I certainly do) that Micro$oft's business-as-usual practices harm consumers, then there's a very real case to be made that the mere trial activity itself has done a great deal of good over the past couple of years.
It seems apparent that Micro$oft has felt itself hampered from pursuing some options as aggressively as it would have preferred. Witness for instance the fact that Dell, Compaq, and Gateway are all shipping machines now without a scrap of Micro$oftware on them. Things have changed for the better, IMO, and regardless of the real verdict in this trial, it's been a worthwhile cause.
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
I personally would rather subsidize the electricity and not pay later at the grocery store, wouldn't you?
No, and here's the basic difference between those who have faith in the market and those who don't - I don't pretend, or trust anyone who pretends, to be able to predict these effects and head them off.
Thus, I think it's just in general a bad idea to attempt to tamper with a market when the outcome and effects thereof are unknown (which they pretty much always are).
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
So can anyone 'splain to me whether a proprietary device driver that is implemented as a loadable module would or would not fall under the GPL?
-- Ryan Waldron
Speaking of GPL and lawyers, does anyone know of any law firms which have specific experience related to GPL and similar licensing for tech companies? I'd like to find a law firm that I don't have to try to explain the whole concept to (and get billed for it), just to get them to help me answer some license questions similar to the one that started this thread.
I thought that the FSF long ago had a list of legal resources on their site for firms that were GPL-friendly or had experience in this, but I looked recently and couldn't find it.
-- Ryan Waldron
Ha! First reply to my own message! Woo woo! Ahem. Sorry, got carried away there.
While it's not a web page, the NANOG mailing list (North American Network Operators Group or some such) at merit.edu gets a bunch of postings like this, close to when they happen, and mostly (it appears) from Sean Donelan at DRA in St. Louis. Dunno why, but he is very good about posting exactlythe sort of things you're asking about. The big drawbacks are that:
But it's exactly the sort of thing you asked for, so I thought I'd mention it. You can subscribe by sending the standard "subscribe nanog" to majordomo@merit.edu.
-- Ryan Waldron
For North American sites, a good synopsis of the big guys is at
http://www.netstat.net/stats.shtml
Another interesting site is the Internet Weather Report. While it's got a tendency to produce some very large images, and it's a little hard to navigate, there are some really cool visual images of the Internet on there.
It's at http://www.internetweather.com.
-- Ryan Waldron
It lies.
I believe the misunderstanding here is over whose rights are at stake. The GPL explicitly protects the freedoms of users against a distributor or modifier of GPLed code exercising a perceived freedom of his own. Thus, for some people who would want to take GPLed code and make proprietary extensions or changes to it, yes, it's limiting. However, for the users of such code, it's freedom-expanding. It trades the freedom for one person to do a specific thing (make proprietary changes that aren't GPLed) for the freedom of many people to do a bunch of specific things (have the source code to make their own changes and mods to).
In the aggregate, it increases freedom. I do not believe that the GPL claims to "expand" an individual author's freedom with respect to an individual package that he's modified. It does claim to also help even the individual author in the same way it helps the rest of the computing public, by increasing the "aggregate" good. Thus, it does not lie, though you may disagree with whether such a goal is or is not noble.
-- Ryan Waldron
It lies.
I believe the misunderstanding here is over whose rights are at stake. The GPL explicitly protects the freedoms of users against a distributor or modifier of GPLed code exercising a perceived freedom of his own. Thus, for some people who would want to take GPLed code and make proprietary extensions or changes to it, yes, it's limiting. However, for the users of such code, it's freedom-expanding. It trades the freedom for one person to do a specific thing (make proprietary changes that aren't GPLed) for the freedom of many people to do a bunch of specific things (have the source code to make their own changes and mods to).
In the aggregate, it increases freedom. I do not believe that the GPL claims to "expand" an individual author's freedom with respect to an individual package that he's modified. It does claim to also help even the individual author in the same way it helps the rest of the computing public, by increasing the "aggregate" good. Thus, it does not lie, though you may disagree with whether such a goal is or is not noble.
increases freedoms (over the standard proprietary licensing schemes)
-- Ryan Waldron
And finally, I dislike the GPL. It has a VERY good goal; but its means to that end are repressive. I don't want my software free if it enslaves people.
As a slogan, this is catchy, but the problem is, the GPL does not enslave anyone. No one has to use it. The FSF/GPL project (personifying for a moment) is a merchant. It offers its goods (really cool software, source included) for a price: philosophical agreement on projects you derive from it.
That's not enslaving, because you have a *choice* whether to derive works from it. It may be seductive, enticing, tempting, annoying, exasperating, etc., but it's not enslaving.
-- Ryan Waldron
I have Office 97, downloaded the zip file, unpacked them, fired up the Weigtemp.xls file, and started getting a series of macro errors.
I know nothing about Excel macros, and really don't have a clue about where to start. It gives me the willies to think about learning a scripting "language" created in Redmond.
So I'm hoping that it's something simple that someone can tell me that instantly presto-change-o solves all my worries and allows me to get the cool exponentially smoothed weight graph.
Anyone else had/solved this problem?
-- Ryan Waldron
That is, if they've entertained serious dreams about landing big bux from a high-profile Valley venture firm.
This is a very nice source for a (perhaps) surprisingly good summation of the OSS phenomenon for business types.
-- Ryan Waldron
I think worries over clone factories and governments using this "revolutionary" technique to stamp out zillions of genetically engineered soldiers misses one important fact - for every single cloned embryo, some woman has to carry that thing in her womb for most of the 9 months and then bear the child. And finding zillions of women willing (and able) to perform such a task for someone other than themselves or their families seems to me highly unlikely.
Cloning sheep is much easier because the ewe doesn't get much choice as to whether she gets impregnated by a scientist in the lab; she's just an animal. But I'm thinking that it ain't gonna go so well for a scientist who attempts to force that on a woman.
Cloning is merely a novel way of creating an embryo, as opposed to the more typical (and considerably more fun) method used heretofore. But it doesn't appear to me that there are any shortage of people willing to contribute to embryo-creation in the old-fashioned way, does it? The real trick, the one that would legitimately raise these questions about what governments and labs might do with them, is if someone figured out how to go from egg to full-term healthy baby without the participation of a female to carry it.
Until that happens, I'm mostly yawning about the "Brave New World" scenarios.
-- Ryan Waldron
I agree that the article on Samba and NT interaction was good, but then, it was from one of our own, after all.
But did you read the hopelessly clueless little screed at the back from "Auntie M. Cee Pee"? Same trash as always - you can't use Linux if you don't know a bunch of arcane commands and a command line. Same old tired FUD at its worst.
What I wonder, for people who think that Un*x commands are arcane - have they ever tried to do any real performance tuning on NT? Talk about arcane...
Not at all! Communism and central planning are government-enforced things. Many people voluntarily contributing their own money toward causes they care about, administered through a non-governmental agency with specific goals and public accountability is not in the same universe as the failed ideologies you mention here.