DSL companies WANT to miss out on customers
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DSL Rising
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· Score: 2
The DSL companies may be very popular, as is cable, but if they don't drop their prices to more afordable levels, they'll lose out on customers.
The cable and phone companies are monopolies, within their service areas. They are indeed loosing out on customers. They don't care. They set their prices to maximize their revenues. They have (in case of the phone company) ISDN services, voice/dialup services, long distance services, DSL, and probably other services that I have forgotten to list. Some of these are substitutes for others, so they have to optimize over all of these prices at once. If they are indeed setting the monopoly price, they will certainly be getting the maximum possible profit, and will certainly be leaving many customers unserved to achieve that.
Yes, I am aware that there are companies which are offering services on the phone companies' lines. They've been unable to get service for their customers, unable to compete with the monopoly, and they seem to be dying like flies, so I don't think they invalidate my argument in general. I haven't heard of anything comparable for the cable companies, either.
It is a commonly-held misconception that cable and phone services are natural monopolies. It is easy to see how the confusion arose: the ownership of the transmission lines is indeed a natural monopoly. The provision of services over those lines is not!
If we were starting from scratch, we could set up monopolies to own and operate the lines, and allow free competition in provision of services over the lines. Any business would be free to offer any service it could move over the lines, EXCEPT the line-owning monopoly. Unfortunately, in the US at least, we have huge, hugely profitable monopolies which have a vested interest in keeping their monopolies on service provision, and are able to prevent any such rational approach.
Isn't America great? We have the best government money can buy!
And now, to drift off topic:
In a few years, if it's not already, it's going to be damn near impossible to do much with a dial-up connection. Web sites are getting larger and more complicated, and more people will need wider pipes.
Not sure that I buy this. I can do anything I want to on dialup. Downloading ISO's is a bit of a problem, but that's what jigdo is for.
If your website is too big and complicated for dialup, I'll do without. Here's a free clue for ``web designers'': if you have lots of Flash and glitz to waste my bandwidth, you're telling me that the content doesn't matter. Since I go looking for content, that means that I don't have to go there!
One of the surest signs that a website is free of useful content is the presence of Flash. Since I've uninstalled Flash from my browser, the web has gotten noticably better. If a site pops up a ``you must download Flash'' message, I know that I can close that tab, without waiting for it to load, or even looking at it.
But I bristle at your notion that libraries ought to be entitled to distribute recently created copyrighted works, with no compensation whatsoever to the author. On what basis do you feel that government should essentially engage in intellectual theft?
I can't speak for the person of whom you asked the question. I can tell you that you're rather confused.
Copyright (in the US; other countries have other laws, some of them quite wrong-headed) is a privilege given you by the government: you are allowed to have a monopoly on your works for a limited time, to encourage you to produce such works.
Notice a couple of important points here:
There is no pre-existing, ``natural right'' to that monopoly.
The government gives that monopoly to you because it is in the public interest to do so, not because you are such a great guy.
So, if the government finds that it is in the public interest that the author not be compensated for the library's use of their works, that is consistent with the constitutional intent of copyright, and certainly not a violation of your rights.
Finally, you talked about ``intellectual theft''. That's why I say you're rather confused. I would call copying without acknowledgment intellectual theft. I would call copying without payment a natural right; one which we have agreed to give up for a limited period of time, to encourage you to write more.
I think that using and building upon the intellectual work of others is an important part of being human, and anything which stands in the way of that is destructive of society, and inhuman. Therefore, we need to be very careful about maintaining an appropriate balance between the privileges we extend to authors, and the natural human right to use their work, which those privileges curtail.
Lets use Slashdot as an example.
What ever Microsoft Does 1 star.
What ever Linux Does 5 Stars.
(They both did the same thing)
I'm sure you also react very differently to the same action, when it's done by different people. For example, imagine that you're in a bar, and your girlfriend grabs your crotch. Now imagine that some strange guy in a bar grabs it the same way. Different reaction yet?
My point is that there is nothing strange or inconsistant in the behavior you are highlighting. Who did it DOES matter, and sometimes it SHOULD affect our reaction.
Cave critters without eyes are not new. The new thing in this was that there were hydrogen sulfide eating bacteria which formed the base of the food chain.
NARRATOR: Serban thought that the layer of scum must hold the key to the cave's ecosystem. Eventually he realised that it was made up of microbes. The scum was a thick microbial mat. This was the base of the food chain, but what were the microbes living on? When Serban analysed the microbes, he discovered that in the absence of sunlight they were using hydrogen sulphide as their energy source. The microbes were extracting energy from chemicals in the water. It's a process known as chemosynthesis The water in the cave is rich in hydrogen sulphide which comes from hot springs welling up from deep within the Earth.
Pity you didn't put that in your original post. It would have been quite interesting. Consider this: the same article has speculation that Lake Vostak may have been a rift valley. That might imply the same sort of hot springs which made the ecosystem in Romania possible.
So you read the article, but didn't summarize it well enough for me to be able to tell what your point was. Sorry for the unjustified criticism.
You obviously didn't read the story you linked to. If you had, you would have seen:
NARRATOR: For biologists the challenge is how to study this lost world. They need samples to analyse, but there are no samples from Lake Vostok, so they can only speculate about what happened to the life after the lake iced over.
CYNAN ELLIS-EVANS: The plants would have disappeared very quickly and once the plants went you lost a major source of food supply for the more complex animals, so once, the plants would disappear the, the animals would follow soon after and once they were gone all that would be left in the lake would be the microbial populations and even they would then start to thin down to the organisms that could make the best of the limited resources left.
NARRATOR: So if anything has survived in Lake Vostok it will be microbes.
Summary for the facts, for those who don't remember this from the last time it popped up on Slashdot:
There is a large lake under the Antarctic icepack. There is considerable debate on whether to drill through 4 miles of ice to get samples of the ancient water, and possibly find ancient bacteria. The anti-drilling side points out that any drilling raises the possibility of contamination with modern bacteria.
By now, it's well known that the PC is a lot faster than the Mac when it comes to just about anything - PCs overtook Macs around the time of the P3 800.
What people should be asking is not price/performance, but why customers will still fork out over $3000 for a Mac that is slower than a much cheaper PC. The answer is in the usability.
Sounds plausible.
First, the Mac looks good - which is important - hell PCs look downright square when placed next to a Mac.
Boy, was I confused! I thought we were talking about tools, not toys. ``It looks good''? If there is really ANY functional difference in the hardware, we seem to have agreed it is probably in the PC's favor. How could any responsible adult justify spending extra on a tool just because ``it looks good''? I suggest that they'd buy stuff that's a lot uglier than PCs if it let them do their work better-faster-cheaper.
Next, it has a great GUI - what's key here is that it's a great FUNCTIONAL GUI,...
I'll take your word for it. I don't like it, but if it works for you, you're probably right. Of course, once you click on the Photoshop icon, that GUI is pretty far in the background. For a work machine, where you spend hours in a single program, the ``great FUNCTIONAL GUI'' argument seems a little less compelling. For a home email/websurfing box, it's perfectly plausible, I suppose.
... unlike even WinXP where though it might look good, things are still buried under layers of menus and dialog boxes.
My non-computer-geek friends don't really have any opinions on computers in general. One of the few opinions I have heard them express unprompted is that XP is UGLY.
It is also different enough from Win2k that they are helpless. Switching to KDE would have been no harder, as far as switching OS goes.
Third, it has a consistent interface - the basic layout has never changed. Contrast that with Windows where the settings that matter generally tend to jump around.
Is that still true for the OS9-->OSX jump?
So to get back to the point, it's not about the speed.
But you haven't convinced me that it's anything else... the usability features that you cite don't look compelling. Your argument doesn't convince me that there is a rational reason to pay a nickle extra for Macs, but folks are definitely doing it. I'm going to suggest that it's network effects: all the expertise in this field is on Mac, so if you want to ask the guy down the hall for help, you'd better be on a Mac too.
It seems that's worthwhile (to the people making the purchasing decision) to pay a whole lot more dollars/unit of hardware performance to get Macs. That is probably has something to do with the fact that it's the boss's money, not the purchaser's.
The scum in question claims that what he does is legal, and ethical. So, what does he have to complain about? And what does your statement have to do with the case at hand?
The person you are calling a victim has told us all that it's ok to do what is being done to him!
Go here: 128.174.237.148 to look up the IP addresses for sites such as 212.111.35.118 and 192.25.206.10.
Strangely enough, it was unable to resolve the IP address which my machine probably accesses most often during the day. I asked it to look up the IP address for localhost, and got: ``Unable to convert localhost''. Oh, well. It's in my hosts file.
And I was hoping to join up and inform them that John Ashcroft wears women's underwear. Oh well...
I'm sure that the FBI/Secret Service/Brownshirts would have taken you into custody until they found out how you knew THAT little tidbit. And probably kept you there for a long, long time, once they did find out. Only those who are closest to him (wink wink, nudge nudge) are supposed to know.
The GPL license puts restrictions on what you can do.
That is absolutely wrong, and I'm afraid that saying it makes you look ignorant. Copyright law puts restrictions on what you can do. If I write a program, and let you have a copy, copyright law forbids you to distribute it, or to distribute derivitive works based upon it.
The GPL removes some of those restrictions: it allows you to redistribute the work, or derivitives based upon it, under certain conditions. What those conditions boil down to is that you cannot reimpose the restrictions which the GPL has removed.
Free software should mean software that can be used freely, without restriction.
Sounds like the GPL to me. I can take a copy of Redhat and peddle it for whatever the market will give me. I can make a derivitive work and do the same. The only thing the GPL stops me from doing is preventing you from enjoying the same freedoms that I enjoy. I'm not surprised that bothers you; most folks seem to think that freedom is fine, as long as the other guy doesn't have it. That's an unstable situation, of course. You're someone else's ``other guy''.
... the MIT license. That is a true "free software" license.
It allows you to restrict the freedoms of others. The extra freedom for you comes at the expense of my freedom. I can understand why that might seem attractive to you, but I can't understand why you think that tradeoff should be attractive to me.
My ideal world is one where there is a wide mix of software and sofware licenses in use.
Sounds OK to me. Stick to the ones you like, and I'll stick to my favorites.
I used to work on General Automation microcomputers (BIG S100 systems with Motorola 68000s, as I recall). These had huge, several MByte hard drives which had a steel spring with a dab of graphite on the end, which rode on the end of the hard drive's spindle, apparently to drain static from the platters. Eventually the graphite would wear out, the steel spring would begin to vibrate and the hard drive would begin to scream. Loudly. This would get us a service call, and we would check the power supply voltages and blow the dust out, and dab a tiny bit of white grease on the spring. In about a year, we'd get another call. It was a great revenue booster, and probably helped keep the machines reliable.
Just to stay on topic, I think they were SCSI drives; they couldn't have been IDE, of course, since that hadn't yet been invented. PCs (the expensive, new ones) were still using RLL harddrives. We never had any problems with them other than the noise, so I really can't remember what interface they used, or even what brand they were.
If olive oil comes from olives, then does baby oil come from babies?
Baby oil used to come from babies, but babies are just too small and too lean to meet the demand. So, most baby oil on the market today comes from plump, cute baby whales. For marketing reasons, of course, they can't call it baby whale oil. Too many people care about baby whales, so telling the truth on this would be corporate suicide. So, the baby oil companies just keep on calling it baby oil, and let you think that what you're buying is rendered baby rather than those cute, fuzzy, big-eyed baby whales. Oh, the humanity!
Who can you trust? Who can carry out his intentions, good or bad? If the bad guys are powerless to harm you and the good guys quite likely to accidently screw you up, who do you watch out for? What does trust have to do with your answer?
I thought I said quite plainly that our government in the US has good intentions for us. They also have the ability to do us far more harm than Osama ever could. Partly that's because we trust our government, partly that's because our government is keeping a lid on Osama and company.
I don't think we should change that second reason: we definitely want our government to continue keeping after the terrorists. I do think that we should never trust our government blindly; not when they're doing us good, not when they're chasing terrorists, in fact, just plain never.
Think about this: if we were in Afganistan before the US invasion, the roles of Osama and the US government would have been reversed, more or less: the US would have seemed threatening but powerless, while the Osamites might have seemed less malevolent, since they professed good intentions, but immediately dangerous. The Afganis couldn't TRUST either, but they had to watch out for the Osamites.
If the government really wants to get you, they'll surround you with Tempest vans, put a key sniffer in your keyboard, grab all your traffic through your ISP and monitor your phone calls.....
So, given that's true, why bother encrypting anything? Answer: if a lot of innocent traffic is encrypted, it significantly raises the effort level required to identify the non-innocent traffic, and thus makes it much less likely that the government WILL decide that it ``really wants to get you''.
Is that a good idea? Even after the events of the last year, government in general still seems to have the resources to be a greater threat to us than all the Islamic malcontents in the the world put together. Some of those governments definitely have the will to do us harm; after all, some of them are run by those same Islamic malcontents. Some of us are living under the power of those evil governments. PGP and its successors have been used by human rights groups operating in countries like Yugoslavia, to keep records secret.
Don't forget, also, that while a despot might tire of amusing himself by persecuting you, the bureaucrats who persecute decent folks in the western world are doing it for our own good, and their self-image as good people and hard workers depends on putting Dimitry in jail, or busting down the doors of prople who have violated a contract with their cable company by uncapping a modem, or what-not. The people who are probably the greatest threat to us in the US and Europe are these well-intentioned, honest, hardworking idiots, who honestly believe that they are protecting us all. Sometimes they ARE protecting us all, and sometimes they are doing quite the opposite, but they are always trying to earn their pay by doing their job, no matter how destructive that may be.
Overall, I think it is an excellent idea to make it as difficult as possible for the government to keep tabs on us, or to single us out, even when our government is NOT deliberately evil, as is the case in the US.
... PGP users delude themselves into thinking they're making a heroic stand for freedom, when in reality, no one cares about their encrypted plans to sleep in line for the Two Towers premiere.
It isn't just governments that have secrets. Most companies have marketing plans, customer lists, and so on that their competition would give big bucks to get. If only the sensitive email is sent encrypted, it's obvious which messages need to be cracked. It's also obvious when there is a flurry of sensitive activity. If you also encrypt your non-sensitive email at work, that eliminates that sort of problem.
Finally, personal, frivolous users of encryption ARE helping folks who have a serious need for it, at least indirectly. See my first paragraph. If they are deluded, well, that's good for the rest of us. We can't afford to have things reach the point that using PGP makes you a suspect. The world is full of folks who are eager to do bad things to good people, some of them with the very best of intentions for the very people they'd harm.
Java C Windows Windows Motivated C++ C SQL Teamwork C++ Perl C GDI C++ Perl Teamwork Windows Perl SQL SQL Motivated Windows GDI C++ Windows Self-Starter Perl C++ C C++ C++ GDI Motivated Self-Starter Python C++ Java Java C++ Python C++...
You SWINE!! You copied my resume! You may expect to hear from my liars!
What is the weakest specced machine that anyone here is getting productive/useful work with Linux done on?
I have a 486 (75 MHz, I think) laptop, with 12 MB RAM. It runs Debian Woody with X11 and the Blackbox window manager. I was using it yesterday to read slashdot and debianplanet. I was using the Dillo browser. Performance was slow, but tolerable. If I want to use emacs, I kill X, or else it starts swapping.
The real holdup for speed is the lack of RAM, rather than the anemic processor, but as long as I'm careful about how many processes I have going, it's fast enough. The holdup for usability is the small, 640x480 screen, and that's more a matter of it being an old laptop than being old.
It's interesting to notice that this little box could run Win3.1, but isn't a speed demon with that either. Win3.1, of course, is old and single-tasking and insecure and nothing modern runs on it. Putting a modern, proprietary OS on this sort of old hardware is probably out of the question.
Based on this, I think that any Pentium with a lot of RAM (more than 64 MB) would be just peachy for email/websurfing. Any Pentium with >32MB should be useable, if set up sensibly.
How can trying some company could cost money to the state? Are they paying the DAs for overtime? Aren't the DAs and other people who work for the state get paid whether there is a case they are trying or not?
Well, maybe you have missed something: this could be a profit center for the states.
From this story:
Miller also disclosed that Microsoft will pay $25 million in legal reimbursements to be divided among states based on how much they spent on the antitrust case. California has borne the brunt of legal costs.
The company was required under federal law to pay those legal fees, though $25 million is far more than the out-of-pocket costs for those states. Government lawyers are paid fixed salaries, but the law calculates reimbursed fees based on hourly rates for private attorneys.
There is also the name-recognition factor, which is so dear to the politically ambitious Attorney General, in any state.
Want to bet that the Massachusetts Attorney General office is a stepping-stone to higher office, for governor wanna-bes who are clever enough to grab some headlines?
Like this guy, maybe?
Here is a link to another article on the same story. From that article:
Reilly maintained Friday that his state, which also is entitled to reimbursement of some attorneys' fees, can afford to continue the court fight alone because the most expensive parts of the case have already been paid.
His decision won plaudits in Washington from Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who said Reilly "now becomes the de facto antitrust division chief of the United States and a high-tech hero to consumers and entrepreneurs." Markey is the top Democrat on the House Commerce Committee panel on telecommunications and the Internet.
...why aren't you calling up your representative and telling him/her to repeal the regressive tax cuts and use the money for space exploration?
Unfortunately, tax cuts HAVE to be regressive. Roughly 5% of the people pay 50% of the taxes. If we wanted to cut personal taxes by more than 50%, then, we'd have to reduce taxes for the Warren Buffets and the Bill Gates.
The really poor folks today don't pay much in the way of taxes to Uncle Sam. That's good, especially since I'm in that bottom tax bracket myself, but it does mean that you can't cut my taxes very far unless you're willing to go to a negative income tax (don't hesitate to do that on my account, of course!).
The pound of dope was more of a threat (well, more newsworthy) than ASSAULT RIFLES?
The drugs are illegal (without a tax stamp, which the government won't sell you, if I recall correctly). The guns are, generally, legal.
Owning the guns, since ( or maybe I should say if) they are suited for military use (see this abc news article for a layman's overview which mentions the US vs Miller case), is specifically protected by the US constitution.
Without the drugs (assuming that the guy wasn't a felon), there would be nothing newsworthy about the guns. With the drugs, they're good for some extra years in jail, but still nothing newsworthy.
I'm talking about reverse engineering the platform from the kernel up.
If this were practical, then wine would also be practical. Wine has been trying for years to emulate (loosely speaking) the Win9X kernel, et cetera, via reverse engineering. They couldn't do it. They've made amazing strides, and done miracles, but their target was moving, and most of what they needed to know was cleverly hidden. MAybe once Win9X is dropped by MS, wine will eventually be able to catch up to it, and make a perfect-enough emulation.
Linux itself started this way, as a reverse-engineered version of Minix.
The Minix source was published, so reverse engineering was doable. There weren't any undocumented APIs. Look also at FreeDos, a libre implementation of MSDOS. Freedos had the advantage of a much simpler and stationary target. Windows 3.1 still won't run on it (that's ok, since they have other GUIs which will). Then there was DR Dos. They wrote a pretty good DOS replacement (simpler than making a new WIN NT), but MS managed to torpedo them.
The original question was:
I mean really, whats so taboo about starting with an open source kernel, binary compatible with the NT kernel, then a desktop manager and supporting apps, functionally compatible with Windows. Port all that wine nonsense over so you have compatible APIs to build from.
``Why don't we just write our own copy of Windows? It'll be, like, compatible and everything.''
I just don't think that's possible. If you can write something which runs the Reader Rabbit games without crashing (anymore than real Windows does), let me know.
... and then bawk at how much it costs to keep a second site available.
``Bawk'' is the noise a chicken makes. Very appropriate here. ``To balk at'' means to struggle against, or complain about, or so. That would have been the more usual thing to see in such a sentence.
>>Don't suggest that that makes him moral, or worthy of emulation, or that those of us who haven't given away 46% of our net worth are somehow inferior.
>Worthy of emulation as far as his charitable donations go... but not his business practices (chicken and egg, I know). I made no statements regarding how good or not good of a person Bill Gates is.
Again, if I were to emulate BillG's charity, as I understand it, I would be giving nothing. He's giving away a fraction of what he can't use. I'm giving what I could make very good use of indeed, because there are others who need it even more than I. I get nothing at all from it, while BillG gets tax breaks and publicity for his business and who knows what else.
The post you were responding to set up a silly strawman, the idea of measuring giving as a percentage of net worth. A more reasonable approach is the approach I take, of measuring giving by whether it hurts. This is a bit less quantifiable, but a reasonable person might believe that BillG's giving hurts him less than mine hurts me. Since I need to repeat myself to get the point across, here goes again: if I was giving to charity the way BillG is, I'd be giving only a fraction of what I could never spend. That's $0.00, for me and most of the rest of us.
Repeating myself again, I am delighted that BillG is finally turing loose some of those bucks that he can't spend. As I recall, it started recently (last ten years or so), but better late than never. I certainly don't despise his charitable efforts. His charitable spending is far more than a thousand folks like me could ever manage.
You seem to think that BillG's efforts make him admirable. I've tried, above, to explain why I disagree. To restate the point again, the fact that he's stopped being a dog-in-the-manger with his surplus money does not make him worthy of emulation. As I said in my first post:
BillG has given away ($billions)/(amount not needed >> 0) = 46%.
I've given away ($thousands)/(amount not needed == 0) = infinity%.
I don't believe that I'm better than he is because of this; but I am irritated that you seem to be suggesting that he is better than I am merely because he has the ability to careless scatter (what is to him) small change about.
Slashdot Mirror
The DSL companies may be very popular, as is cable, but if they don't drop their prices to more afordable levels, they'll lose out on customers.
The cable and phone companies are monopolies, within their service areas. They are indeed loosing out on customers. They don't care. They set their prices to maximize their revenues. They have (in case of the phone company) ISDN services, voice/dialup services, long distance services, DSL, and probably other services that I have forgotten to list. Some of these are substitutes for others, so they have to optimize over all of these prices at once. If they are indeed setting the monopoly price, they will certainly be getting the maximum possible profit, and will certainly be leaving many customers unserved to achieve that.
Yes, I am aware that there are companies which are offering services on the phone companies' lines. They've been unable to get service for their customers, unable to compete with the monopoly, and they seem to be dying like flies, so I don't think they invalidate my argument in general. I haven't heard of anything comparable for the cable companies, either.
It is a commonly-held misconception that cable and phone services are natural monopolies. It is easy to see how the confusion arose: the ownership of the transmission lines is indeed a natural monopoly. The provision of services over those lines is not!
If we were starting from scratch, we could set up monopolies to own and operate the lines, and allow free competition in provision of services over the lines. Any business would be free to offer any service it could move over the lines, EXCEPT the line-owning monopoly. Unfortunately, in the US at least, we have huge, hugely profitable monopolies which have a vested interest in keeping their monopolies on service provision, and are able to prevent any such rational approach.
Isn't America great? We have the best government money can buy!
And now, to drift off topic:
In a few years, if it's not already, it's going to be damn near impossible to do much with a dial-up connection. Web sites are getting larger and more complicated, and more people will need wider pipes.
Not sure that I buy this. I can do anything I want to on dialup. Downloading ISO's is a bit of a problem, but that's what jigdo is for.
If your website is too big and complicated for dialup, I'll do without. Here's a free clue for ``web designers'': if you have lots of Flash and glitz to waste my bandwidth, you're telling me that the content doesn't matter. Since I go looking for content, that means that I don't have to go there!
One of the surest signs that a website is free of useful content is the presence of Flash. Since I've uninstalled Flash from my browser, the web has gotten noticably better. If a site pops up a ``you must download Flash'' message, I know that I can close that tab, without waiting for it to load, or even looking at it.
I can't speak for the person of whom you asked the question. I can tell you that you're rather confused.
Copyright (in the US; other countries have other laws, some of them quite wrong-headed) is a privilege given you by the government: you are allowed to have a monopoly on your works for a limited time, to encourage you to produce such works.
Notice a couple of important points here:
There is no pre-existing, ``natural right'' to that monopoly.
The government gives that monopoly to you because it is in the public interest to do so, not because you are such a great guy.
So, if the government finds that it is in the public interest that the author not be compensated for the library's use of their works, that is consistent with the constitutional intent of copyright, and certainly not a violation of your rights.
Finally, you talked about ``intellectual theft''. That's why I say you're rather confused. I would call copying without acknowledgment intellectual theft. I would call copying without payment a natural right; one which we have agreed to give up for a limited period of time, to encourage you to write more.
I think that using and building upon the intellectual work of others is an important part of being human, and anything which stands in the way of that is destructive of society, and inhuman. Therefore, we need to be very careful about maintaining an appropriate balance between the privileges we extend to authors, and the natural human right to use their work, which those privileges curtail.
I'm sure you also react very differently to the same action, when it's done by different people. For example, imagine that you're in a bar, and your girlfriend grabs your crotch. Now imagine that some strange guy in a bar grabs it the same way. Different reaction yet?
My point is that there is nothing strange or inconsistant in the behavior you are highlighting. Who did it DOES matter, and sometimes it SHOULD affect our reaction.
Cave critters without eyes are not new. The new thing in this was that there were hydrogen sulfide eating bacteria which formed the base of the food chain.
Pity you didn't put that in your original post. It would have been quite interesting. Consider this: the same article has speculation that Lake Vostak may have been a rift valley. That might imply the same sort of hot springs which made the ecosystem in Romania possible.So you read the article, but didn't summarize it well enough for me to be able to tell what your point was. Sorry for the unjustified criticism.
There is a large lake under the Antarctic icepack. There is considerable debate on whether to drill through 4 miles of ice to get samples of the ancient water, and possibly find ancient bacteria. The anti-drilling side points out that any drilling raises the possibility of contamination with modern bacteria.
What people should be asking is not price/performance, but why customers will still fork out over $3000 for a Mac that is slower than a much cheaper PC. The answer is in the usability.
Sounds plausible.
First, the Mac looks good - which is important - hell PCs look downright square when placed next to a Mac.
Boy, was I confused! I thought we were talking about tools, not toys. ``It looks good''? If there is really ANY functional difference in the hardware, we seem to have agreed it is probably in the PC's favor. How could any responsible adult justify spending extra on a tool just because ``it looks good''? I suggest that they'd buy stuff that's a lot uglier than PCs if it let them do their work better-faster-cheaper.
Next, it has a great GUI - what's key here is that it's a great FUNCTIONAL GUI, ...
I'll take your word for it. I don't like it, but if it works for you, you're probably right. Of course, once you click on the Photoshop icon, that GUI is pretty far in the background. For a work machine, where you spend hours in a single program, the ``great FUNCTIONAL GUI'' argument seems a little less compelling. For a home email/websurfing box, it's perfectly plausible, I suppose.
My non-computer-geek friends don't really have any opinions on computers in general. One of the few opinions I have heard them express unprompted is that XP is UGLY.
It is also different enough from Win2k that they are helpless. Switching to KDE would have been no harder, as far as switching OS goes.
Third, it has a consistent interface - the basic layout has never changed. Contrast that with Windows where the settings that matter generally tend to jump around.
Is that still true for the OS9-->OSX jump?
So to get back to the point, it's not about the speed.
But you haven't convinced me that it's anything else ... the usability features that you cite don't look compelling. Your argument doesn't convince me that there is a rational reason to pay a nickle extra for Macs, but folks are definitely doing it. I'm going to suggest that it's network effects: all the expertise in this field is on Mac, so if you want to ask the guy down the hall for help, you'd better be on a Mac too.
It seems that's worthwhile (to the people making the purchasing decision) to pay a whole lot more dollars/unit of hardware performance to get Macs. That is probably has something to do with the fact that it's the boss's money, not the purchaser's.
True, in general. But.
The scum in question claims that what he does is legal, and ethical. So, what does he have to complain about? And what does your statement have to do with the case at hand? The person you are calling a victim has told us all that it's ok to do what is being done to him!
Strangely enough, it was unable to resolve the IP address which my machine probably accesses most often during the day. I asked it to look up the IP address for localhost, and got: ``Unable to convert localhost''. Oh, well. It's in my hosts file.
I'm sure that the FBI/Secret Service/Brownshirts would have taken you into custody until they found out how you knew THAT little tidbit. And probably kept you there for a long, long time, once they did find out. Only those who are closest to him (wink wink, nudge nudge) are supposed to know.
That is absolutely wrong, and I'm afraid that saying it makes you look ignorant. Copyright law puts restrictions on what you can do. If I write a program, and let you have a copy, copyright law forbids you to distribute it, or to distribute derivitive works based upon it.
The GPL removes some of those restrictions: it allows you to redistribute the work, or derivitives based upon it, under certain conditions. What those conditions boil down to is that you cannot reimpose the restrictions which the GPL has removed.
Free software should mean software that can be used freely, without restriction.
Sounds like the GPL to me. I can take a copy of Redhat and peddle it for whatever the market will give me. I can make a derivitive work and do the same. The only thing the GPL stops me from doing is preventing you from enjoying the same freedoms that I enjoy. I'm not surprised that bothers you; most folks seem to think that freedom is fine, as long as the other guy doesn't have it. That's an unstable situation, of course. You're someone else's ``other guy''.
It allows you to restrict the freedoms of others. The extra freedom for you comes at the expense of my freedom. I can understand why that might seem attractive to you, but I can't understand why you think that tradeoff should be attractive to me.
My ideal world is one where there is a wide mix of software and sofware licenses in use.
Sounds OK to me. Stick to the ones you like, and I'll stick to my favorites.
Just to stay on topic, I think they were SCSI drives; they couldn't have been IDE, of course, since that hadn't yet been invented. PCs (the expensive, new ones) were still using RLL harddrives. We never had any problems with them other than the noise, so I really can't remember what interface they used, or even what brand they were.
Baby oil used to come from babies, but babies are just too small and too lean to meet the demand. So, most baby oil on the market today comes from plump, cute baby whales. For marketing reasons, of course, they can't call it baby whale oil. Too many people care about baby whales, so telling the truth on this would be corporate suicide. So, the baby oil companies just keep on calling it baby oil, and let you think that what you're buying is rendered baby rather than those cute, fuzzy, big-eyed baby whales.
Oh, the humanity!
>Wow, that's pretty high. Anybody know where their numbers are coming from?
Everyone knows that 73% of all statistics are wrong.
Obviously, those numbers are part of the 99% of all statistics which are either pulled from thin air or (mis)quoted out of context.
I thought I said quite plainly that our government in the US has good intentions for us. They also have the ability to do us far more harm than Osama ever could. Partly that's because we trust our government, partly that's because our government is keeping a lid on Osama and company.
I don't think we should change that second reason: we definitely want our government to continue keeping after the terrorists. I do think that we should never trust our government blindly; not when they're doing us good, not when they're chasing terrorists, in fact, just plain never.
Think about this: if we were in Afganistan before the US invasion, the roles of Osama and the US government would have been reversed, more or less: the US would have seemed threatening but powerless, while the Osamites might have seemed less malevolent, since they professed good intentions, but immediately dangerous. The Afganis couldn't TRUST either, but they had to watch out for the Osamites.
An yo pint is wha?
So, given that's true, why bother encrypting anything? Answer: if a lot of innocent traffic is encrypted, it significantly raises the effort level required to identify the non-innocent traffic, and thus makes it much less likely that the government WILL decide that it ``really wants to get you''.
Is that a good idea? Even after the events of the last year, government in general still seems to have the resources to be a greater threat to us than all the Islamic malcontents in the the world put together. Some of those governments definitely have the will to do us harm; after all, some of them are run by those same Islamic malcontents. Some of us are living under the power of those evil governments. PGP and its successors have been used by human rights groups operating in countries like Yugoslavia, to keep records secret.
Don't forget, also, that while a despot might tire of amusing himself by persecuting you, the bureaucrats who persecute decent folks in the western world are doing it for our own good, and their self-image as good people and hard workers depends on putting Dimitry in jail, or busting down the doors of prople who have violated a contract with their cable company by uncapping a modem, or what-not. The people who are probably the greatest threat to us in the US and Europe are these well-intentioned, honest, hardworking idiots, who honestly believe that they are protecting us all. Sometimes they ARE protecting us all, and sometimes they are doing quite the opposite, but they are always trying to earn their pay by doing their job, no matter how destructive that may be.
Overall, I think it is an excellent idea to make it as difficult as possible for the government to keep tabs on us, or to single us out, even when our government is NOT deliberately evil, as is the case in the US.
It isn't just governments that have secrets. Most companies have marketing plans, customer lists, and so on that their competition would give big bucks to get. If only the sensitive email is sent encrypted, it's obvious which messages need to be cracked. It's also obvious when there is a flurry of sensitive activity. If you also encrypt your non-sensitive email at work, that eliminates that sort of problem.
Finally, personal, frivolous users of encryption ARE helping folks who have a serious need for it, at least indirectly. See my first paragraph. If they are deluded, well, that's good for the rest of us. We can't afford to have things reach the point that using PGP makes you a suspect. The world is full of folks who are eager to do bad things to good people, some of them with the very best of intentions for the very people they'd harm.
I have a 486 (75 MHz, I think) laptop, with 12 MB RAM. It runs Debian Woody with X11 and the Blackbox window manager. I was using it yesterday to read slashdot and debianplanet. I was using the Dillo browser. Performance was slow, but tolerable. If I want to use emacs, I kill X, or else it starts swapping.
The real holdup for speed is the lack of RAM, rather than the anemic processor, but as long as I'm careful about how many processes I have going, it's fast enough. The holdup for usability is the small, 640x480 screen, and that's more a matter of it being an old laptop than being old.
It's interesting to notice that this little box could run Win3.1, but isn't a speed demon with that either. Win3.1, of course, is old and single-tasking and insecure and nothing modern runs on it. Putting a modern, proprietary OS on this sort of old hardware is probably out of the question.
Based on this, I think that any Pentium with a lot of RAM (more than 64 MB) would be just peachy for email/websurfing. Any Pentium with >32MB should be useable, if set up sensibly.
Well, maybe you have missed something: this could be a profit center for the states. From this story:
There is also the name-recognition factor, which is so dear to the politically ambitious Attorney General, in any state.
Like this guy, maybe?
Here is a link to another article on the same story. From that article:
Sounds as if it's working already.Unfortunately, tax cuts HAVE to be regressive. Roughly 5% of the people pay 50% of the taxes. If we wanted to cut personal taxes by more than 50%, then, we'd have to reduce taxes for the Warren Buffets and the Bill Gates.
The really poor folks today don't pay much in the way of taxes to Uncle Sam. That's good, especially since I'm in that bottom tax bracket myself, but it does mean that you can't cut my taxes very far unless you're willing to go to a negative income tax (don't hesitate to do that on my account, of course!).
The drugs are illegal (without a tax stamp, which the government won't sell you, if I recall correctly). The guns are, generally, legal.
Owning the guns, since ( or maybe I should say if) they are suited for military use (see this abc news article for a layman's overview which mentions the US vs Miller case), is specifically protected by the US constitution.
Without the drugs (assuming that the guy wasn't a felon), there would be nothing newsworthy about the guns. With the drugs, they're good for some extra years in jail, but still nothing newsworthy.
If this were practical, then wine would also be practical. Wine has been trying for years to emulate (loosely speaking) the Win9X kernel, et cetera, via reverse engineering. They couldn't do it. They've made amazing strides, and done miracles, but their target was moving, and most of what they needed to know was cleverly hidden. MAybe once Win9X is dropped by MS, wine will eventually be able to catch up to it, and make a perfect-enough emulation.
Linux itself started this way, as a reverse-engineered version of Minix.
The Minix source was published, so reverse engineering was doable. There weren't any undocumented APIs. Look also at FreeDos, a libre implementation of MSDOS. Freedos had the advantage of a much simpler and stationary target. Windows 3.1 still won't run on it (that's ok, since they have other GUIs which will). Then there was DR Dos. They wrote a pretty good DOS replacement (simpler than making a new WIN NT), but MS managed to torpedo them.
The original question was:
``Why don't we just write our own copy of Windows? It'll be, like, compatible and everything.''
I just don't think that's possible. If you can write something which runs the Reader Rabbit games without crashing (anymore than real Windows does), let me know.
``Bawk'' is the noise a chicken makes. Very appropriate here. ``To balk at'' means to struggle against, or complain about, or so. That would have been the more usual thing to see in such a sentence.
>Worthy of emulation as far as his charitable donations go... but not his business practices (chicken and egg, I know). I made no statements regarding how good or not good of a person Bill Gates is.
Again, if I were to emulate BillG's charity, as I understand it, I would be giving nothing. He's giving away a fraction of what he can't use. I'm giving what I could make very good use of indeed, because there are others who need it even more than I. I get nothing at all from it, while BillG gets tax breaks and publicity for his business and who knows what else.
The post you were responding to set up a silly strawman, the idea of measuring giving as a percentage of net worth. A more reasonable approach is the approach I take, of measuring giving by whether it hurts. This is a bit less quantifiable, but a reasonable person might believe that BillG's giving hurts him less than mine hurts me. Since I need to repeat myself to get the point across, here goes again: if I was giving to charity the way BillG is, I'd be giving only a fraction of what I could never spend. That's $0.00, for me and most of the rest of us.
Repeating myself again, I am delighted that BillG is finally turing loose some of those bucks that he can't spend. As I recall, it started recently (last ten years or so), but better late than never. I certainly don't despise his charitable efforts. His charitable spending is far more than a thousand folks like me could ever manage.
You seem to think that BillG's efforts make him admirable. I've tried, above, to explain why I disagree. To restate the point again, the fact that he's stopped being a dog-in-the-manger with his surplus money does not make him worthy of emulation. As I said in my first post:
BillG has given away ($billions)/(amount not needed >> 0) = 46%.
I've given away ($thousands)/(amount not needed == 0) = infinity%.
I don't believe that I'm better than he is because of this; but I am irritated that you seem to be suggesting that he is better than I am merely because he has the ability to careless scatter (what is to him) small change about.