Companies discontinue products all the time. Usually it's because the product has lived it's useful life, and needs to be replaced, or their estimated profit margin wasn't fulfilled.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, or anything, but I know sometimes companies discontinue a line of products so they can introduce a new line of similar products, and sell to their current customers who now have 'obsolete' products.
They've essentially just forced a bunch of clients to use unsupported gear, or pay someone(hopefully them) to replace it. If this is the case, open-sourcing would be counter-productive.
While your notional HTML snippet is undoubtedly correct in many cases, it doesn't represent the article under discussion. The author clearly states he likes Postgres, which is both free and ACID-complete.
and:
You've totally missed the point. God knows why this is classed as funny, but it's the sort of open source evangleism whilst ignoring the facts that gives us a bad name.
To both of you, 'crosseyed & painless' and 'meadowsp', I say: It's funny, laugh.
I've run into this on many occasion: me: I need a unix type box to do testing. suit: We can't afford another sparc box. me: we can install linux on that spare machine right there. suit: Linux is bad. It doesn't cost enough money to be a good product.
Same thing has happened to me with regard to other things such as sendmail, and apache.
If this has never happened to either of you, that's great. But most of us don't have such open-minded powers that be. It's happened to me, and it's obviously happened to the moderator.
I posted it because the suit mentality is funny to laugh at. Get a sense of humour.
Myself, and a lot of people I know are getting more than a little miffed at the current state of the music industry. We see no value (other than eye candy, in certain cases) in manufactured music -- music from 'bands' such as Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys that were created by a producer for no other purpose than to make loads of money. This, IMHO, is no higher on the musical food chain than advertising jingles.
True bands are becoming fewer. The signal to noise ratio is getting weaker, and it's getting harder and harder to find musicians who are in it for more than the money. There's a quote on the Johnny Cash Tribute Album, at the start of 'Long Black Veil' that goes something like "In an era of manufactured music, the following musician has earned his fans the old-fashioned way, performing night after night, to earn dedicated fans." Of course, this is about the Dave Mathews band.
Let's face it. Metallica is rich. Or at least, you SHOULD be. My question: Why is Metallica allowing their record label, or themselves to push the band to become part of this manufactured music clique? I completely understand the violation of copyright here, and I disagree with those distributing, but is this REALLY about the money? If it is, maybe you should look at bands like the DMB, and Phish, and even the Grateful Dead who allowed their tracks to be recorded and distributed, or bands like Limp Bizkit, who are actually TEAMING UP with Napster.
Re:Don't let Microsoft's numbering confuse you
on
Linux 2.2.15 Released
·
· Score: 2
I wish they'd use a scheme like 2.2.009 instead of 2.2.9.
When looking through FTP, and trying to find the latest release, it's REALLY annoying to have to look through the whole list to find it. The newest, 1.2.17 is actually quite a bit higher on the list than 1.2.6.
If the project was named 1.2.017 and 1.2.006, we wouldn't have this problem. We would, however run into a problem of only allowing 1000 releases per minor version number, but why REALLY wants to see more than 1000 releases before a new version comes out?
why haven't CD prices dropped in the last ten years?
I know that this is slightly off topic, but that's pretty simple. Greed, and inflation.
Why is it that CDs are still more expensive than tapes, even though it's cheaper, faster and more reliable to press CDs than to duplicate tapes (no moving parts, less material, greater demand)?
Simple. When a consumer-media industry decides that their general unit price should be higher, they adopt a new format, and put lots of marketing behind it.
Look at DVDs, for example, $6-$10 more expensive than their VHS counterparts, yet they're cheaper to make.
It's a book for understanding the basics of how the kernel works, why things are structured as they are, and to learn about this design, thus making it so that you may be able to understand the latest version of the kernel.
_VERY_ good point. It seems to be about learning the CONCEPTS of kernel development that apply to Linux.
When a new version of GCC gets released, you don't need to re-learn to code, do you?
It's these concepts that can be used to further the development of future innovative (sorry to use that word) projects. Same as, if you already know 5 programming languages, it's not THAT hard to pick up a sixth, quickly.
Sure, they're going to have a hard time tracking down all of these users, and prosecuting ANY of them. I'm sure the number's inflated, but you don't really think that there are only 4000 users on Napster at any given time, right?
There are many napster servers. You can easily prove this by logging on, submitting a search, not finding the song, re-connecting, and finding the song.
If there are 8 napster servers, each with the 4000 users you've seen, we've got ~10% of the 333k users Metallica claims to be pursuing. Plus, we don't know how often users log in and out.. I don't think that 1/4 million users distributing Metallica IP on napster is impossible.
There is entirely too much abuse of useless java apps, useless javascript requirements, useless flash, and a bunch of other crap that looks pretty but makes your website less usable.
[what follows is slightly OT]
I agree with you on the whole 'too much useless crap' notion, but you seem to think that usability is the most important part of website design, as does most of the slashdot community. A lot of you/us seem bent on the idea of 'make everything text, get rid of images, get rid of animations'
I believe that it's good to consider the users who are unable to view all that fun stuff, but without it, what exactly _is_ the web? I'll tell you: gopher.
Every month, I shell out the $7 for the printed version of Wired magazine. Why? Most of the stuff in there is available online now, from wired, or otherwise. Simple. I like all the cool stuff they do with their mag. Fluorescent spot colors, metallic inks, scratch and sniff covers, all of that makes it worth the $7 to me.
Same with web sites. If a site is bland, but has good information, you'll get somewhat poor user opinions. Same as a flashy, animated, graphic, loud site with no good information. The key is getting a mix of both that degrades gracefully to browsers that don't support 'features' of your site.
...Microsoft practically single-handedly turned the PC from the haven of 31337 tech-savvy "gurus" to a domain where anyone could use a computer to browse the internet, write letters and play games...
Uh, that was Apple, not Microsoft. Microsoft merely 'appropriated' the idea of the GUI (which, I know, was originally a XPARC project), and had more success with their marketing campaign, and chosen hardware platform.
As for the 'blindly following some dogmatic principle.' matter: Most of the slashdot users who dislike Microsoft did so before it became the 'in' thing to do, and with good reason.
Even though it has become pop culture to bash Microsoft, and point and laugh at their falling stock price, thanks to CNN coverage of the DoJ vs. Microsoft trial, this is not a fad for/.'ers who have disliked MS all along.
It's not a 'dogmatic principle'. It's thinking for ourselves, and seeing through their fierce marketing campaign that plagues potential users who see the flashy adds that get overplayed during primetime. Blindly following would be giving in to these ads without knowing about the alternatives. "Yes, that's where I want to go today!"
There are valid reasons to dislike Microsoft, and their products, but being '31337', as you put it, is not one of them.
I know it's a new product and all, and I know it's market driven, but isn't £39.99 a tad on the expensive side?
If I'm not mistaken, that converts to ~$90USD! My telco has a monopoly on ADSL here in NB, Canada, and I only pay $39.95CDN/month. Which is more like ~$22USD.
Cars are not easy to drive, but practically everyone learns how, and they don't have to re-learn a new interface for each model year.
Good point, but the automobile has been around for around 100 years now, and the GUI, 30(ish). The gui, really, hasn't been in mainstream use since 1985-1990(ish).
The gui can't settle down until it has matured. Imagine if we hadn't developed new concepts since Win3.1?
Basic things like Drop Down Lists, Radio Buttons, and different types of scroll bars, most certainly have evolved over time. Multi-Select, for instance, boxes still don't work all that well. How would a new user know to press CTRL to select more than one item?
We've still got a way to go before we can make every interface behave the same release after release.
There are studies for everything now. Some make sense, some don't. A study to see if a certain percentage of people feel that the ending of a film was stupid and needs to be changed makes sense. A study to see if people like the new NBC lineup makes sense. A study linking video games to real life doesn't make sense.
I'm a firm believer that if you try hard enough, spend enough money, and have the 'blessing' of the right people, you can prove ANYTHING through obscure statistics.
I'm getting screwed on my car insurance. Why? Because I'm a male, and I'm 20 years old. My monthly insurance payment is only a little less than my monthly lease payment. I pay around $250/month for insurance. My driving record is spotless. I have (female) friends my age who've caused accidents who pay a lot less than I do (studies and statistics prove that in my age category, males get into more accidents than females.
Makes sense, right? Well, what if a study was conducted to see if black people get in more accidents than white people. Or homosexuals in more accidents than hetrosexuals?
Well, that would be just WRONG/prejudiced/racist, wouldn't it?
I've learned to take 'scientific' studies with a big grain of salt.
Can you speculate at least a little bit and give us a realistic scenario? I'm genuinely curious.
Sure, completely hypothetical:
Lets say that TimeWarner continues to grow, and gains.. 90% market share. Quite unrealistic, but hear me out. They grow to this size by buying out competition, stealing ideas -- er.. innovating, etc, etc.
So, when almost all people come home from work, and turn the evening news, they see AOL/TW news. The content is developed and censored/moderated/whatever by them. They fire up their web browser, and almost all news they see comes from the same place. Newspapers and radio, same thing. One source. It might not look like one source -- different names, but essentially, the news is coming from the same place.
Getting back to my point of "I saw it on the news/read it in the paper, so it must be true" mentality, what's to stop a huge bohemoth like this media machine from hurting competitors, other than trivial laws (which we all know only work sometimes).
What if AOL/TW is in bed with a presidential candidate (I'm being metaphorical here -- no, really)? Would we even KNOW about the other candidates? Most certainly, the most publicised candidate would have a somewhat unfair jump on the others.
Think of coverups. AOL screws up. They let a whole database of all their clients passwords and credit card numbers be cracked. Would we know about it? Accountability gets thrown out the window.
These are all worst case situations, of course, but.. well.. I'm paranoid.
There's no HARD evidence that anyone ever landed on the moon.
I don't see AOL having very much power. The only effect AOL has in my house is as coasters...
The media has WAY too much power. The Time-Warner merger with AOL gives them MORE power.
Imagine what it would be like if the media was controlled by a single organization. Ever read 1984? If not, do it. It's a really good read.
Slashdot-terminal has a quote in his sig. "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
For those of you who haven't read the book, that quote refers to Winston Smith's job. His job was to 'update' old newspapers. If a paper made a 'mistake' in one of their articles. For instance, last quarter, the ministry of plenty could've said "There will be a surplus of goods next quarter. Everyone will get their boots and coats!" Which made the people happy, when actually the next quarter was a poor quarter. Nobody got their boots and coats. Smith's job was to update the article to show that the ministry 'didn't actually say' what it reported they said. When people tried to look up the article, they would realize that the ministry of truth actually did not say ANYTHING about boots and coats.
Anyway, my point is that the media is not trustworthy, and the general public are sheep. Look at Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast. People killed themselves because they thought aliens were coming. (If you don't know anything about the WOTW broadcast, read up on it.. it's pretty interesting).
We need to start thinking on our own, and stop letting the little glass-fronted boxes in our livingroom and computerroom do it for us.
(side note: Rob, slashdot's eating HTML on the preview.)
Slashdot Mirror
Companies discontinue products all the time. Usually it's because the product has lived it's useful life, and needs to be replaced, or their estimated profit margin wasn't fulfilled.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, or anything, but I know sometimes companies discontinue a line of products so they can introduce a new line of similar products, and sell to their current customers who now have 'obsolete' products.
They've essentially just forced a bunch of clients to use unsupported gear, or pay someone(hopefully them) to replace it. If this is the case, open-sourcing would be counter-productive.
While your notional HTML snippet is undoubtedly correct in many cases, it doesn't represent the article under discussion. The author clearly states he likes Postgres, which is both free and ACID-complete.
and:
You've totally missed the point. God knows why this is classed as funny, but it's the sort of open source evangleism whilst ignoring the facts that gives us a bad name.
To both of you, 'crosseyed & painless' and 'meadowsp', I say: It's funny, laugh.
I've run into this on many occasion:
me: I need a unix type box to do testing.
suit: We can't afford another sparc box.
me: we can install linux on that spare machine right there.
suit: Linux is bad. It doesn't cost enough money to be a good product.
Same thing has happened to me with regard to other things such as sendmail, and apache.
If this has never happened to either of you, that's great. But most of us don't have such open-minded powers that be. It's happened to me, and it's obviously happened to the moderator.
I posted it because the suit mentality is funny to laugh at. Get a sense of humour.
If it's free, it can't be any good. Let's buy MSSQL7.
</APPAREL>
Email me. I want to write a piece on this.
sean.coates@hawk.nb.ca
Sean
I always wondered why FBI never set up a series of "sting" sites for just such logging.
I'm probably mistaken, but isn't that 'entrapment'?
Myself, and a lot of people I know are getting more than a little miffed at the current state of the music industry. We see no value (other than eye candy, in certain cases) in manufactured music -- music from 'bands' such as Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys that were created by a producer for no other purpose than to make loads of money. This, IMHO, is no higher on the musical food chain than advertising jingles.
True bands are becoming fewer. The signal to noise ratio is getting weaker, and it's getting harder and harder to find musicians who are in it for more than the money. There's a quote on the Johnny Cash Tribute Album, at the start of 'Long Black Veil' that goes something like "In an era of manufactured music, the following musician has earned his fans the old-fashioned way, performing night after night, to earn dedicated fans." Of course, this is about the Dave Mathews band.
Let's face it. Metallica is rich. Or at least, you SHOULD be. My question: Why is Metallica allowing their record label, or themselves to push the band to become part of this manufactured music clique? I completely understand the violation of copyright here, and I disagree with those distributing, but is this REALLY about the money? If it is, maybe you should look at bands like the DMB, and Phish, and even the Grateful Dead who allowed their tracks to be recorded and distributed, or bands like Limp Bizkit, who are actually TEAMING UP with Napster.
I wish they'd use a scheme like 2.2.009 instead of 2.2.9.
When looking through FTP, and trying to find the latest release, it's REALLY annoying to have to look through the whole list to find it. The newest, 1.2.17 is actually quite a bit higher on the list than 1.2.6.
If the project was named 1.2.017 and 1.2.006, we wouldn't have this problem. We would, however run into a problem of only allowing 1000 releases per minor version number, but why REALLY wants to see more than 1000 releases before a new version comes out?
why haven't CD prices dropped in the last ten years?
I know that this is slightly off topic, but that's pretty simple. Greed, and inflation.
Why is it that CDs are still more expensive than tapes, even though it's cheaper, faster and more reliable to press CDs than to duplicate tapes (no moving parts, less material, greater demand)?
Simple. When a consumer-media industry decides that their general unit price should be higher, they adopt a new format, and put lots of marketing behind it.
Look at DVDs, for example, $6-$10 more expensive than their VHS counterparts, yet they're cheaper to make.
I'd pay $5 to be able to moderate it up a point.
I smell a new business model for Slashdot. Lose adfu, bring in the for-pay moderation.
It's a book for understanding the basics of how the kernel works, why things are structured as they are, and to learn about this design, thus making it so that you may be able to understand the latest version of the kernel.
_VERY_ good point. It seems to be about learning the CONCEPTS of kernel development that apply to Linux.
When a new version of GCC gets released, you don't need to re-learn to code, do you?
It's these concepts that can be used to further the development of future innovative (sorry to use that word) projects. Same as, if you already know 5 programming languages, it's not THAT hard to pick up a sixth, quickly.
Well, I live in Canada, so it's $7CDN which is actually equal to about $3.85USD. (-:
Seriously though, it's cheaper and A LOT faster to buy it at the newsstand for me.
I think CmdrTaco mentioned something about this last week. As soon as they finish shooting a video, or something?
I'd REALLY like to be in on this interview.
Sure, they're going to have a hard time tracking down all of these users, and prosecuting ANY of them. I'm sure the number's inflated, but you don't really think that there are only 4000 users on Napster at any given time, right?
There are many napster servers. You can easily prove this by logging on, submitting a search, not finding the song, re-connecting, and finding the song.
If there are 8 napster servers, each with the 4000 users you've seen, we've got ~10% of the 333k users Metallica claims to be pursuing. Plus, we don't know how often users log in and out.. I don't think that 1/4 million users distributing Metallica IP on napster is impossible.
You mean I'm NOT supposed to type in my REAL email address?
What about on IRC. It's still ok to put in my real name in the "Real Name" box, right?
(-:
There is entirely too much abuse of useless java apps, useless javascript requirements, useless flash, and a bunch of other crap that looks pretty but makes your website less usable.
[what follows is slightly OT]
I agree with you on the whole 'too much useless crap' notion, but you seem to think that usability is the most important part of website design, as does most of the slashdot community. A lot of you/us seem bent on the idea of 'make everything text, get rid of images, get rid of animations'
I believe that it's good to consider the users who are unable to view all that fun stuff, but without it, what exactly _is_ the web? I'll tell you: gopher.
Every month, I shell out the $7 for the printed version of Wired magazine. Why? Most of the stuff in there is available online now, from wired, or otherwise. Simple. I like all the cool stuff they do with their mag. Fluorescent spot colors, metallic inks, scratch and sniff covers, all of that makes it worth the $7 to me.
Same with web sites. If a site is bland, but has good information, you'll get somewhat poor user opinions. Same as a flashy, animated, graphic, loud site with no good information. The key is getting a mix of both that degrades gracefully to browsers that don't support 'features' of your site.
Sorry. My rant-of-the-week.
Uh, isn't it a lot easier to just look at the URL, and where it sayd "threshold=-1" change it to "threshold=-5"
Unless that doesn't work for some reason. I've never tried browsing below -1. Why? There's too much crap at +1.
(notice me not using my +1 on this. On purpose)
...Microsoft practically single-handedly turned the PC from the haven of 31337 tech-savvy "gurus" to a domain where anyone could use a computer to browse the internet, write letters and play games...
/.'ers who have disliked MS all along.
Uh, that was Apple, not Microsoft. Microsoft merely 'appropriated' the idea of the GUI (which, I know, was originally a XPARC project), and had more success with their marketing campaign, and chosen hardware platform.
As for the 'blindly following some dogmatic principle.' matter: Most of the slashdot users who dislike Microsoft did so before it became the 'in' thing to do, and with good reason.
Even though it has become pop culture to bash Microsoft, and point and laugh at their falling stock price, thanks to CNN coverage of the DoJ vs. Microsoft trial, this is not a fad for
It's not a 'dogmatic principle'. It's thinking for ourselves, and seeing through their fierce marketing campaign that plagues potential users who see the flashy adds that get overplayed during primetime. Blindly following would be giving in to these ads without knowing about the alternatives. "Yes, that's where I want to go today!"
There are valid reasons to dislike Microsoft, and their products, but being '31337', as you put it, is not one of them.
Ah yes. I was using the Dollar = 2.2 Pounds math.
But that's for the Canadian.
Maybe I'm full of crap (-:
I know it's a new product and all, and I know it's market driven, but isn't £39.99 a tad on the expensive side?
If I'm not mistaken, that converts to ~$90USD! My telco has a monopoly on ADSL here in NB, Canada, and I only pay $39.95CDN/month. Which is more like ~$22USD.
Like I said, I guess the market will dictate.
Cars are not easy to drive, but practically everyone learns how, and they don't have to re-learn a new interface for each model year.
Good point, but the automobile has been around for around 100 years now, and the GUI, 30(ish). The gui, really, hasn't been in mainstream use since 1985-1990(ish).
The gui can't settle down until it has matured. Imagine if we hadn't developed new concepts since Win3.1?
Basic things like Drop Down Lists, Radio Buttons, and different types of scroll bars, most certainly have evolved over time. Multi-Select, for instance, boxes still don't work all that well. How would a new user know to press CTRL to select more than one item?
We've still got a way to go before we can make every interface behave the same release after release.
Am I the only one who thinks the iMac looks like "Barbie's Dream Computer"?
... or this iron.
Check out the (old) articl e at ZDNet.
There are studies for everything now. Some make sense, some don't. A study to see if a certain percentage of people feel that the ending of a film was stupid and needs to be changed makes sense. A study to see if people like the new NBC lineup makes sense. A study linking video games to real life doesn't make sense.
I'm a firm believer that if you try hard enough, spend enough money, and have the 'blessing' of the right people, you can prove ANYTHING through obscure statistics.
I'm getting screwed on my car insurance. Why? Because I'm a male, and I'm 20 years old. My monthly insurance payment is only a little less than my monthly lease payment. I pay around $250/month for insurance. My driving record is spotless. I have (female) friends my age who've caused accidents who pay a lot less than I do (studies and statistics prove that in my age category, males get into more accidents than females.
Makes sense, right? Well, what if a study was conducted to see if black people get in more accidents than white people. Or homosexuals in more accidents than hetrosexuals?
Well, that would be just WRONG/prejudiced/racist, wouldn't it?
I've learned to take 'scientific' studies with a big grain of salt.
Hey AC, thanks. That's a great quote. It's in my sig now.
Can you speculate at least a little bit and give us a realistic scenario? I'm genuinely curious.
Sure, completely hypothetical:
Lets say that TimeWarner continues to grow, and gains.. 90% market share. Quite unrealistic, but hear me out. They grow to this size by buying out competition, stealing ideas -- er.. innovating, etc, etc.
So, when almost all people come home from work, and turn the evening news, they see AOL/TW news. The content is developed and censored/moderated/whatever by them. They fire up their web browser, and almost all news they see comes from the same place. Newspapers and radio, same thing. One source. It might not look like one source -- different names, but essentially, the news is coming from the same place.
Getting back to my point of "I saw it on the news/read it in the paper, so it must be true" mentality, what's to stop a huge bohemoth like this media machine from hurting competitors, other than trivial laws (which we all know only work sometimes).
What if AOL/TW is in bed with a presidential candidate (I'm being metaphorical here -- no, really)? Would we even KNOW about the other candidates? Most certainly, the most publicised candidate would have a somewhat unfair jump on the others.
Think of coverups. AOL screws up. They let a whole database of all their clients passwords and credit card numbers be cracked. Would we know about it? Accountability gets thrown out the window.
These are all worst case situations, of course, but.. well.. I'm paranoid.
There's no HARD evidence that anyone ever landed on the moon.
I don't see AOL having very much power. The only effect AOL has in my house is as coasters...
The media has WAY too much power. The Time-Warner merger with AOL gives them MORE power.
Imagine what it would be like if the media was controlled by a single organization. Ever read 1984? If not, do it. It's a really good read.
Slashdot-terminal has a quote in his sig. "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
For those of you who haven't read the book, that quote refers to Winston Smith's job. His job was to 'update' old newspapers. If a paper made a 'mistake' in one of their articles. For instance, last quarter, the ministry of plenty could've said "There will be a surplus of goods next quarter. Everyone will get their boots and coats!" Which made the people happy, when actually the next quarter was a poor quarter. Nobody got their boots and coats. Smith's job was to update the article to show that the ministry 'didn't actually say' what it reported they said. When people tried to look up the article, they would realize that the ministry of truth actually did not say ANYTHING about boots and coats.
Anyway, my point is that the media is not trustworthy, and the general public are sheep. Look at Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast. People killed themselves because they thought aliens were coming. (If you don't know anything about the WOTW broadcast, read up on it.. it's pretty interesting).
We need to start thinking on our own, and stop letting the little glass-fronted boxes in our livingroom and computerroom do it for us.
(side note: Rob, slashdot's eating HTML on the preview.)