I said here before it would get down to $80 within 4 weeks (once people who got their shares for free sell out) after the IPO and I think that will indeed happen.
It's not only the lame pre-IPO management, it's the fact that they're a single product company and that product (ads) is a commodity.
Their placement technology is probably the best at the moment, but once someone else does that part better and sells it to Yahoo or Microsoft, they head further south...
1. Get a USB wireless hub 2. Pay for WLAN access at Starbucks 3. Get a seat at Starbucks and resell cheap WLAN access to other guests 4. And the/.-mandatory: Profit
Real asked Apple to support the (i.e. license their technology), the rotten Apple refused.
On that account, Real users should be mad at Apple. Considering that Real hacked the system, though, it won't be Apple's responsiblity.
It's going to be similar to Gaim / Yahoo problems - you get Gaim, fine, but be ready for ocassional outages every now and then... Most people who use Gaim to connect to Yahoo obviously can live with it, otherwise they wouldn't be using it. The same will happen with Real (the only difference is that it won't happen suddenly and Real will have to fix the thing before everyone gets affected).
Surely it doesn't improve safety but that question was a stupid troll question anyway.
Personally I don't give a shit if someone feels less free or whatever, when all passengers are ID-ed, that makes me feel a lot better.
What benefit do I have from not carrying an ID? For one reason or another, I always have to carry an ID document anyway. Whether "they" know where I go or not, I couldn't care less - compared to risks, the benefit is truly marginal.
When you play a file over the Internet, you do download a copy in browser cache and play from there (or do some kind of in-memory buffering), but you rarely want to save the actual file (unless it's a hard-to-get or unique content). In that way you do "copy" a file but not really download it - and if I can decide which files I want to share and if the network is fast, I don't think people would want to download my files - they'd just play them (or open read-only) remotely.
Years ago Motorola had a project (prototype?) of cell phone that was installable in one's ear. One still had to speak to use it, but it was "transparent" to the user since no mic or earset where necessary.
In the future I think they will have something like virtual memory-mapped communication which would allow communication without natural language.
>Any form of direct mental link would probably decrease the amount of control available.
couple of years ago i was surprised how big the Linux kernel has become. then i had this idea for a short SF-story - by 2025 the Linux kernel grows to 50TB and countries, by then completely dependent on open source software, are forced to perform compulsory recruitment for kernel maintenance.... years later, the number of people involved becomes unbelievable and the situation becomes unbearable.
then from there the story can have an open source ending (they solve the problem - AI, whatever) or an closed source ending...
From the article: >Computers and communication devices embedded in their bodies allow them to transfer files to friends through thought alone and to conduct phone conversations subvocally.
Oh this is really silly! a) Why would one transfer (copy!) any files when network bandwidth and performance would allow fast file access directly over network connection? b) Why would one use "phone" when minds would be able to allow read-only access to things one'd like to communicate to each other?
Heh, heh... That post of mine was at first modded Funny, then later Insightful, both of which were my purpose.
I wanted to say that no matter what one does regarding content pricing, there will always be people who will pirate it - especially P2P scumbags who always bitch about pricing even when it's more than reasonable (or, indeed, those who put those PDFs on P2P for no personal gain)
(I've done business in China; if I were to do this thing, I wouldn't sell on eBay and wouldn't ship to the U.S.)
>Because it's against the rules and dishonest, duh
Hey - this is Slashdot, where many are proud of their P2P achievements which are against the rules (laws) and dishonest (to artists who create the music).
When people are bent on doing something, they always find a good reason to do what they want.
That's the whole point - there is NO difference and because of that, there won't be much resistance to having athletes enhance themselves. Now they run 100m in 9.90s or something - if they did it in 8.90 - it's same fun (add the additional element of fun - watching non-enhanced althetes trying to compete!).
Few people care, there's a lot of money to be made and there's a lot of incentive for althetes to go alone - the perfect situation.
(On the funny side - watching marathons would be much less exhausting for slackers like me if they could finish it in an hour or so)
It is interesting to consider parallels between bio-engineered doping and aesthetic surgery.
Somewhere I read how one participant at a beauty contest admitted she'd fixed her looks and then other participants requested her disqualification. She was the only "enhanced" beauty - she was the only honest one.
So what can we do? Can we draw a line? A corrective surgery disqualifies you but another emergency surgery to fix broken nose from a traffic accident doesn't? Or bar every one who's ever "went under the knife" from participation? Are braces illegal because they're used instead of corrective teeth surgery?
The same is with sports - why can one individual have a mutated gene and I can't? Since it's not "natural" (as in "common"), why only him/her?
One way to make it fair is to make everything allowed. Of course for many that will have bad consequences for their health, but so do current "enhancers" that cannot be detected. And ultimately it is up to the athlete to make a decision - as is now. Can they disallow that? It's undetectable and "natural" - unless they expand testing to athletes' parents and families there's no way they can detect if a gene or whatever is natural or mutated.
Coaches should have criminal responsibility for providing athletes with dangerious/harmful substances to keep coaches in the check. While it's not easy to say what is just "bad for you" and what is really dangerous, but at least reasonable due dilligence would suffice.
I do think the _current_ system is unfair - people with disabilities cannot compete at all, people with "normal" genes aren't (very) competitive. So the system is biased in favor of the few sprinkled with couple genetic anomalies (=improvements).
And finally - bring the whole genetic performance enhancing idea to education - woooo hoooo! Since the society is powered by greed, most people will give their kids anything to make them better off...
Per-unit costs can be reasonable even for single-copy runs. Actually there's at least one machine specializing in single-copy runs, but I can't find that company on Google right now...
>I think they'd make more money by providing the books for the cost of download ($2 or $3 a e-book) and then offering exclusive paperbacks/hardbacks to people who want them at $20 or $30 a pop, or they can offer books that'll last forever for more.
If someone did that, I'd print hardbacks in China and sell them on eBay at $10 a pop.
1) Move to a country where few folks speak English 2) Say anything you want and noone will give a shit 3) Perfect democracy!
France? There not only stealing digital content (P2P) is illegal, the government acts against import of foreign content (movies). Some democracy! What free speech? They yet need to get the right to free watching and listening!
Seriously, get real. He's moved out of country because it didn't work out for him - it's easier to get by that way than to stay on and fight for your rights. Any foreign country is no less shitty than the U.S.
a) Didn't give anything (witheld name of API that doesn't work), but wants something back b) Didn't consider searching the vendor's Web site c) Lazy to go spend 15 minutes on Google (or doesn't know how to use Google, which is even worse), but not lazy to post a worthless article and waste everyone's time
Can you explain how exactly were you locked in when you could have bought Mac and Sun workstations in the open market and/or downloaded Linux for free (even easier than going Wall Mart)? You were locked inside your own mind.
>Wal Mart don't own the stores AND the advertising space in the town.
(I didn't mean to execute chmod as hacker, but as sysadmin - instead of doing things they do it'd be sufficient to chmod files you don't want executable and disable services you don't want to run. Not to mention iptables, Bastille, intrusion detection and other tools that can be used to prevent unauthorized access).
Would such screwed up OS work at all? Its own programs wouldn't find their way around and the sysadmin would screw up the system sooner or later.
On the second question - what if one tries manually executing several files (auto-complete with the TAB key is always helpful) until they've found five-six commands that suffice for a script?
1. find all files 2. check each file's attributes 2a. If the file is an executable, run 'man executable$i > executable$i.txt' to get man pages or just./executable$i > executable$i.txt to collect error message strings. 3. Do a loop on the text output - parse headers of collected man pages to find the actual name of each command (the first word in the first line until the left parenthesis - for example from fdisk man page: # awk -F"(" '{ print $1 }' fdisk.txt | head -1 FDISK Now this needs to be converted to lowercase and one can automatically create Bash aliases for those commands (or for the important few, such as fdisk, for example).
A real hacker would do this with one-line script... Once someone's gained root access, none of these little tricks can stop him.
>WTF exactly. chkconfig doesn't have the slightest thing to do with a custom kernel.
It has in the sense why would you compile a kernel with "fewer services" (this is a WTF in itself - services have nothing to do with the kernel but I wasn't the one who said that) when you can simply disable services you don't want to run?
Slashdot Mirror
I knew it!
I said here before it would get down to $80 within 4 weeks (once people who got their shares for free sell out) after the IPO and I think that will indeed happen.
It's not only the lame pre-IPO management, it's the fact that they're a single product company and that product (ads) is a commodity.
Their placement technology is probably the best at the moment, but once someone else does that part better and sells it to Yahoo or Microsoft, they head further south...
REDUNDANT REDUNDANT REDUNDANT
/. - I don't post redundant stuff five times a week)
(Well, this post is redundant too, but at least - unlike to
Here's a biz model:
/.-mandatory: Profit
1. Get a USB wireless hub
2. Pay for WLAN access at Starbucks
3. Get a seat at Starbucks and resell cheap WLAN access to other guests
4. And the
>Because they have to *support* Real's format.
Real asked Apple to support the (i.e. license their technology), the rotten Apple refused.
On that account, Real users should be mad at Apple. Considering that Real hacked the system, though, it won't be Apple's responsiblity.
It's going to be similar to Gaim / Yahoo problems - you get Gaim, fine, but be ready for ocassional outages every now and then...
Most people who use Gaim to connect to Yahoo obviously can live with it, otherwise they wouldn't be using it.
The same will happen with Real (the only difference is that it won't happen suddenly and Real will have to fix the thing before everyone gets affected).
Let him be...
Bozos like that will always find something to bitch about...
"I refuse to pay for music that contains sounds"
"I refuse to pay for music that is compressed"
"I refuse to pay for music that is not free"
Surely it doesn't improve safety but that question was a stupid troll question anyway.
Personally I don't give a shit if someone feels less free or whatever, when all passengers are ID-ed, that makes me feel a lot better.
What benefit do I have from not carrying an ID? For one reason or another, I always have to carry an ID document anyway. Whether "they" know where I go or not, I couldn't care less - compared to risks, the benefit is truly marginal.
When you play a file over the Internet, you do download a copy in browser cache and play from there (or do some kind of in-memory buffering), but you rarely want to save the actual file (unless it's a hard-to-get or unique content).
In that way you do "copy" a file but not really download it - and if I can decide which files I want to share and if the network is fast, I don't think people would want to download my files - they'd just play them (or open read-only) remotely.
Years ago Motorola had a project (prototype?) of cell phone that was installable in one's ear. One still had to speak to use it, but it was "transparent" to the user since no mic or earset where necessary.
In the future I think they will have something like virtual memory-mapped communication which would allow communication without natural language.
>Any form of direct mental link would probably decrease the amount of control available.
That is true.
> Sorry, I prefer to keep my [very limited] desktop space.
Haven't you seen that ad for large LCD monitors?
couple of years ago i was surprised how big the Linux kernel has become. then i had this idea for a short SF-story - by 2025 the Linux kernel grows to 50TB and countries, by then completely dependent on open source software, are forced to perform compulsory recruitment for kernel maintenance.... years later, the number of people involved becomes unbelievable and the situation becomes unbearable.
then from there the story can have an open source ending (they solve the problem - AI, whatever) or an closed source ending...
From the article:
>Computers and communication devices embedded in their bodies allow them to transfer files to friends through thought alone and to conduct phone conversations subvocally.
Oh this is really silly!
a)
Why would one transfer (copy!) any files when network bandwidth and performance would allow fast file access directly over network connection?
b)
Why would one use "phone" when minds would be able to allow read-only access to things one'd like to communicate to each other?
Heh, heh... That post of mine was at first modded Funny, then later Insightful, both of which were my purpose.
I wanted to say that no matter what one does regarding content pricing, there will always be people who will pirate it - especially P2P scumbags who always bitch about pricing even when it's more than reasonable (or, indeed, those who put those PDFs on P2P for no personal gain)
(I've done business in China; if I were to do this thing, I wouldn't sell on eBay and wouldn't ship to the U.S.)
Actually the UFO news was carried by many normal/credible mainstream media.
http://news.google.com/news?q=tunguska%20alien
Dude, the machine is NOT meant to be purchased by each individual writer :-)
>Because it's against the rules and dishonest, duh
Hey - this is Slashdot, where many are proud of their P2P achievements which are against the rules (laws) and dishonest (to artists who create the music).
When people are bent on doing something, they always find a good reason to do what they want.
That's the whole point - there is NO difference and because of that, there won't be much resistance to having athletes enhance themselves.
Now they run 100m in 9.90s or something - if they did it in 8.90 - it's same fun (add the additional element of fun - watching non-enhanced althetes trying to compete!).
Few people care, there's a lot of money to be made and there's a lot of incentive for althetes to go alone - the perfect situation.
(On the funny side - watching marathons would be much less exhausting for slackers like me if they could finish it in an hour or so)
Exactly!
From the article:
>Even in sedentary rats, AAV-IGF-I provided a 15 percent strength increase, similar to what we saw in the earlier mouse experiments.
That's what we need - just a small boost!
It is interesting to consider parallels between bio-engineered doping and aesthetic surgery.
Somewhere I read how one participant at a beauty contest admitted she'd fixed her looks and then other participants requested her disqualification.
She was the only "enhanced" beauty - she was the only honest one.
So what can we do? Can we draw a line?
A corrective surgery disqualifies you but another emergency surgery to fix broken nose from a traffic accident doesn't?
Or bar every one who's ever "went under the knife" from participation? Are braces illegal because they're used instead of corrective teeth surgery?
The same is with sports - why can one individual have a mutated gene and I can't? Since it's not "natural" (as in "common"), why only him/her?
One way to make it fair is to make everything allowed. Of course for many that will have bad consequences for their health, but so do current "enhancers" that cannot be detected. And ultimately it is up to the athlete to make a decision - as is now.
Can they disallow that? It's undetectable and "natural" - unless they expand testing to athletes' parents and families there's no way they can detect if a gene or whatever is natural or mutated.
Coaches should have criminal responsibility for providing athletes with dangerious/harmful substances to keep coaches in the check.
While it's not easy to say what is just "bad for you" and what is really dangerous, but at least reasonable due dilligence would suffice.
I do think the _current_ system is unfair - people with disabilities cannot compete at all, people with "normal" genes aren't (very) competitive. So the system is biased in favor of the few sprinkled with couple genetic anomalies (=improvements).
And finally - bring the whole genetic performance enhancing idea to education - woooo hoooo!
Since the society is powered by greed, most people will give their kids anything to make them better off...
This is only the beginning...
http://www.futureprint.kent.edu/articles/henke01.h tm
http://www.bookmachine.com/news_dal.html
Per-unit costs can be reasonable even for single-copy runs. Actually there's at least one machine specializing in single-copy runs, but I can't find that company on Google right now...
>I think they'd make more money by providing the books for the cost of download ($2 or $3 a e-book) and then offering exclusive paperbacks/hardbacks to people who want them at $20 or $30 a pop, or they can offer books that'll last forever for more.
If someone did that, I'd print hardbacks in China and sell them on eBay at $10 a pop.
1) Move to a country where few folks speak English
2) Say anything you want and noone will give a shit
3) Perfect democracy!
France? There not only stealing digital content (P2P) is illegal, the government acts against import of foreign content (movies). Some democracy!
What free speech? They yet need to get the right to free watching and listening!
Seriously, get real.
He's moved out of country because it didn't work out for him - it's easier to get by that way than to stay on and fight for your rights.
Any foreign country is no less shitty than the U.S.
Yet another useless article.
a) Didn't give anything (witheld name of API that doesn't work), but wants something back
b) Didn't consider searching the vendor's Web site c) Lazy to go spend 15 minutes on Google (or doesn't know how to use Google, which is even worse), but not lazy to post a worthless article and waste everyone's time
Hereby I moderate the Article as Redundant
>In the retail market, no-one is locked in.
Can you explain how exactly were you locked in when you could have bought Mac and Sun workstations in the open market and/or downloaded Linux for free (even easier than going Wall Mart)?
You were locked inside your own mind.
>Wal Mart don't own the stores AND the advertising space in the town.
No, they own the town.
> World domination by Microsoft is a terrifying thought.
Didn't we live in it and nothing terrifying ever happened?
(I didn't mean to execute chmod as hacker, but as sysadmin - instead of doing things they do it'd be sufficient to chmod files you don't want executable and disable services you don't want to run. Not to mention iptables, Bastille, intrusion detection and other tools that can be used to prevent unauthorized access).
./executable$i > executable$i.txt to collect error message strings.
Would such screwed up OS work at all?
Its own programs wouldn't find their way around and the sysadmin would screw up the system sooner or later.
On the second question - what if one tries manually executing several files (auto-complete with the TAB key is always helpful) until they've found five-six commands that suffice for a script?
1. find all files
2. check each file's attributes
2a. If the file is an executable, run 'man executable$i > executable$i.txt' to get man pages or just
3. Do a loop on the text output - parse headers of collected man pages to find the actual name of each command (the first word in the first line until the left parenthesis - for example from fdisk man page:
# awk -F"(" '{ print $1 }' fdisk.txt | head -1
FDISK
Now this needs to be converted to lowercase and one can automatically create Bash aliases for those commands (or for the important few, such as fdisk, for example).
A real hacker would do this with one-line script... Once someone's gained root access, none of these little tricks can stop him.
>WTF exactly. chkconfig doesn't have the slightest thing to do with a custom kernel.
It has in the sense why would you compile a kernel with "fewer services" (this is a WTF in itself - services have nothing to do with the kernel but I wasn't the one who said that) when you can simply disable services you don't want to run?
Is AdolF Hitler what you wanted to be?