The problem is that the content products like movies, music even books try to pretend they are normal products until it comes time to actually discuss profit margins and production costs.
You would say that if a movie cost X to produce then if it made a box office result of X+Y that Y would be profit? It don't work like that, extremely successfull movies that break box-office records can nonetheless show a LOSS. Hollywood style accounting would get you arrested in any other field, but somehow we tolerate it because... well you got to wonder why it is tolerated.
It seems rather convenient that the movie industry is allowed to just inflate its costs on all of its products until they rather handily do not show a profit. Say I create an item, a painting, I put itup for auction, then as the price goes higher and higher I keep increasing the costs of the paint I used so that even if my simple pencil drawing started out with a cost of a penny, if it sells for a million, it cost me a million and a penny to produce.
Idiotic? Well it happens all the time in movies, just look at the Spiderman movies and Lord of the Rings trilogy. Products that OBVIOUSLY had more revenue then cost but that is NOT what the final account says.
I know this will shock americans, but it is high time the state steps in and regulates the content industry. Offcourse that won't happen, any politician who dares regulate hollywood will be torn to shreds by the media.
And we swallow it, what is the favorite show of Slashdot? Futurama? How many eps show rampant anti-piracy propoganda? A show were turning humans into a softdrink is perfectly fine, but copyright infringement is an evil that deserves an entire episode.
We are controlled by the media, as long as the media can set public opinion they can abuse this by making sure politicians who do what they want them to do get noticed, and the ones who go against get buried.
Oh and don't think for a second that the content industry cares one shit about censorship. Ratings, a fine for a nipple? All part of charade. In exchange for allowing Hollywood to make its own economic rules, the politicians are allowed to introduce simplistic and ineffective self regulation.
And no, this is NOT a conspiracy theorie, there are no shadowy meetings in which this is arranged, it is just how things work. Conspiracy theorists are dreamers, idealists who hope that there is a clear enemy who no matter how powerfull can ultimately be overcome one day.
Real life don't work that way, there is just an understanding. Politicians leave the content producers alone, and the content producers won't tear them a new hole in the public eye.
Ever wonder why we think Kerry was a stiff, Al Gore to intellectual? Who do you think put that image in our minds? Watch the media very carefully and see how every person who is the smallest threath to the way things are done is assasinated.
Just imagine how you would react to a Jay Leno monologue about a senator who wishes to put the IRS in charge of examing hollywoods finanicials. How many seconds do you think he would need to tear this guy down and the audience swallowing it hook line and sinker?
The politicians KNOW this, the media controls the public so they can never control them.
Some people believe a free press is needed to keep goverment in check, but who keeps the media in check? Examine the politics in England and how newspaper support for one party or the other can swing the election. The media is the watchdog, but who watches the watcher? The public? Yeah right, they only know what the media tells them.
Ebay is NOT an auction house, that is the problem
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eBay Battles Power Sellers
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ebay is closer to an auction engine, it suplies the tool but the SELLER is the one who is the auctioneer, this is odd because usually in auctions there is a threesome going on. Seller, Buyers and Auctioneer. The auctioneer is the middle man and makes sure BOTH sides keep up their side of the bargain.
The whole thing about negative feedback doesn't happen in real auction houses. Rememeber that deal with the vizors of the La Forge not being the real one worn by the actor? Was it the seller OR christies who took the heat for that? Answer,the auction house, they accepted the item and certified it as being real.
If I buy something at an auction I pay the auction house and THEY hand me the item. E-bay is a far cry from this and people forget this.
Auction houses are an ancient invention, there is a REASON they work the way they do so it is only natural that when ebay tries to change this ancient process problems will occur.
If ebay worked like a normal auction house then there wouldn't be any problems other then the typical buyer beware, but that is try anywhere.
Netflix is an american company, that makes me presume you are an american. American's do NOT watch subs, you did. Netflix therefor assumes you like foreign movies. Its programmer did NOT include the option that you were simply a snob. It is an oversight, there are plenty of people who only watch movies from certain foreign countries, but Netflix apparently just considers you as a person willing to deal with foreign languages.
Oh and you taste is indeed lobsided, I too watch japanese movies, but also those from hong-kong, korea, china etc etc. Granted it is easier if you limit yourselve in some way, but I would welcome a system that would truly be capable of recommending movies of my taste and language would NOT be a criteria I want to be considered. I happily watch a signed movie, with subtitles of course how is that for irony!, if it was the kind I liked. Sadly no such system yet exists (I am not from the US so can't even try netflix).
You watch the movies to learn the language, fair enough but do you really expect a commercial company to accomodate your needs with a recommendation system? You don't need that you just need a searchable database that records the language.
A recommendation system is to recommend movies that fit your taste, not an absolute requirement. This is what makes it so hard. Say I like Whispers of the heart, a japanese animated coming of age movie. Should it then recommend to me other anime movies? No. Should it then recommend to me other japanese movies? No. Should it then recommend to me other coming of age movies? Almost! Should it recommend movies that have a similar feel to the one I liked? YES!
That is why it is so hard. Your requirements are simple and IMDB can do it for you, but recommending a movie based on a list of other movies you like without just listing the obvious is a LOT harder.
That limited editions sell? That is NOTHING NEW. They ALWAYS SOLD, which is why you can't move for special editions. The RIAA KNOWS that limited box sets sell, all this does is confirm it.
The limited box set being available for 300 dollars is NOT the news item, neither is him making lots of money by selling directly to the consumer, the RIAA knows this as well. They KNOW you make the most money if you are the one doingthe selling, that is why they want to continue doing the selling.
The new bit was the rather large free sample andhis relaxed attitude to copying the rest, but again, a lot of artists have been relaxed about copyright from the start. It is the music labels that think copying is evil!
So by all means, cheer the eventual death of the major record labels and their fronts, but don't think that a limited box set making lots of money for the guy selling it is going to suddenly wake them up. This is old news to them.
Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?
Oh sure DESKTOP HD's are getting bigger all the time but what is a blue-ray or HD-DVD movie, 40-50 GB? That means a large HD can only hold 10 movies. Not much if you consider how many DVD's movie BUYERS got. Some people I know got large enough collection to stretch the capacity of pro-sumer level NAT storage, how the fuck are they going to find enough computer storage to store all this in HD?
Then offcourse you need to hook up this storage to the TV, how is this done?
Oh yes, there are solutions and workarounds a plenty, but I don't see any it being adopted anytime soon, just as MOVIE projectors BEFORE VHS were NOT popular.Oh right, some of you younger ones may not know this. No VHS did NOT mean the start of the movie rental business. It was available LONG before. You could always just rent a projector and some movies and real enthousiats had their own setup. But it was far to much of a hassle for the general public.
VHS made it easy NOT just to record your own shows, but to simply pop down the corner rental story, rent a movie and watch it.
This lead to a huge boom in the industry for a bit with countless stores opening.
It lost its luster a bit, partially because many more TV channels became available all catering to their own crowd. Simply watching whatever the tube feeds you after all is still easier.
But watch HD movies from a PC, that is a lot of hassle, NO, we on slashdot CANNOT judge this. People who compile their own kernel are naturally going to be a bit more inclined to be tech savy then those whose VCR has a blinking clock.
iTunes? iTunes is a joke, its sales are pathetic if you consider the market it operates in. Do the math, how many BILLIONS of consumers does it reach and how many SONGS (SONGS! Not full albums) has it sold? iTunes is the biggest online store, but compared to offline sales it just doesn't compare.
There have been several attempt at on-demand and download services and THEY ALL FAILED.
Don't get me wrong, it is OBVIOUSLY the future, but the future ain't here yet. At the moment we just don't have the tech to handle that amount of content without a shiny disc to put it on.
What people tend to forget is how slow things really change. DVD's didn't replace VHS for years. LP's sold for ages beside CD's. Digital download has been a dream for as long the internet came into existence and it just isn't ready yet. Just ask youtube why they don't serve all their vidoes in HD. Their servers, would choke and it would mean you would have to pick your movie now if you want to watch it over the weekend.
And then their is that shiny Blu-Ray disc in a store or rental place, you can pick it up, slot it in and watch it. No PC whining, no ISP complaining, no harddisk screaming for mercy. It just works.
I think downloads are going to have to wait a bit until those parts of the world who are willing to pay for their content can get their downloads as easy as a disc.
The guy tried to sell a pair of bikes for 600 dollars, then received a check for 2000 dollars, and tried to cash it in. He then claims he found that suspicious and all, sure he did AFTER THE FACT! It wouldn't look good in court to say "I thought it was my lucky day receiving more then TRIPLE the amount we agreed".
WHOOOP, WHOOOP, WHOOOP! Red FLAG!
The article explains that this is part of a scam and you can't scam an honest person. What honest person would believe that someone sends more then 200% of the price to cover transport and as a bonus? Isn't the whole point of buying second hand to SAVE costs? How much are these bikes worth in the first place?
No the guy got greedy, and paid for it with being arrested. The bank itself did nothing wrong, they behaved EXACTLY as they should have. So did the police.
Sadly this guy was a victim of scammers, and partly his own greed. The scammers were the ones who send him the check that got him arrested. His own greed helped because without this particulair scam wouldn't have worked (the article explains the scam) but if the scammer had wanted the bikes without paying he would still have been arrested, if the check had been for a single dollar, he would stillhave been arrested.
A lot of workplaces will have physically secured machines but nonetheless with ports open. People might notice if you remove a server from a rack to access its insides, but just plugging in a cable?
Yes offcourse, not that many machines have firewire and servers are even rarer (although my pc has a port) but still, there is a major difference between the access needed to open a PC and gets its HD and just plugging in a cable.
See it as the difference between having to steal secret documents and being able to copy them at the spot.
If this tools indeed works in seconds then that is a lot faster then opening up a PC, taking out its HD, installing it in another machine, breaking its security, reading the contents you want (which at this point would give you only the contents on the HD, not the network), re-installing it and closing the cover and removing every trace of your access.
A lot of security is about inconvenience. Safes ain't rated for being unbreakable, but how long it takes to open them. ANY safe can be opened, the trick is making the process take so long that it can not be done without being found out. Thanks to MS, breaking its security has just become a lot more convenient.
What do you think they are converting you lamebrain? They kept the originals, so no upsampling needed (doesn't really work anyway), they just RE-encode the original.
Unfortunately what works for Radiohead isn't necessarily going to work for other musicians.
This was an often heard comment after Radiohead did it.
You update it to:
Unfortunately what works for Radiohead and NIN isn't necessarily going to work for other musicians.
Next band:
Unfortunately what works for Radiohead and NIN and Band X isn't necessarily going to work for other musicians.
Give it a couple of years and your comment will be marked informative for being the definitive list of every musician still active.
Do yourselve a favor, don't copy & past the same lousy comment from the radiohead thread and just insert the various band names, sooner or later you are going to look pretty silly.
Oh and giving your music away for free is nothing new, new bands do it all the time, in fact I still got a tape that my mother got from Peter Blanker (dutch artist, not that famous himself but wrote a lot of lyrics for others), specially 'mixed' to have his adult songs on one side and kids songs on the other.
A friend of mine is into alternative music, REALLY alternative, think music where they burn 10 cd's and 9 go to the "press" and the rest to the fan (yes I spelled it correctly). The difference here is that TWO big sellers have decided that this new method makes more sense for them.
Oh and as for it getting stale, tell the porn industry when they launch yet another starlet. The consumer is an ever hungry beast. There can never be enough new content out there.
Anything that stimulates you is bad, you want the brain to be inactive, doing ANYTHING before you go to sleep therefor is bad. If you really want to sleep well do so in a DARK, SILENT room with no stimuli, don't read in bed, don't talk in bed, don't watch tv etc etc. It also helps if the room is a bit colder then you would keep the living room.
I agree with the rest, with 10 or more hours spend on working, several more on chores, who indeed has time to sleep? It is one reason I really miss an old job where I only worked 6 hours and could start early. It left the afternoon free to do all the stuff you have to do like cleaning and shopping, and you could fully enjoy your evening. Looking back I was far better off back then, but offcourse you never know how good you have it till it is gone.
It just doesn't fit in our life-style of non-tiring but time-consuming work to have to switch of for a 1/3 of a day every day. No, catching up on your sleep in the weekend ain't no good either. Intelligent Design? My foot!
The west 'solved' it with immigration. Tell me, how long did those riots last in France?
How many bombs have been set-off by this solution?
Until japan gets the first downtown areas that are no-go areas with out of control robots, or get to deal with robot terrorists, who are we to say there way is wrong.
Their country, their way of dealing with lifes problems.
The idea of free speech in a truly unlimited form has been overtaken by technology.
When the constitution was written, printing presses were still new and therefor expensive to own and operate. It was easy to say "everyone can say what they want when they want" when in reality this meant you either stood on a soapbox in a corner of a park. Sure you could print a leaflet but that cost money, want it distributed, that costs even more. Reality made sure that free speech was very hard to excersise.
E-mail has changed everything, a spammer can send millions of emails at little to no cost. You mention junk-mail, sure that is a nuisance but the MAILER has to pay serious cash to do it. I happen to know that mass mail campaigns are very carefull of what areas their "spam" because of the high costs, if there ain't a store near enough to a town or suburb, that one is skipped because they know they won't be getting any meaningfull response anyway. Area too poor or to rich? Don't get the mail either. It may not seem like it but junk mail is caefully pruned to make sure it only arrives at those houses where people might be intrested.
An email spammer doesn't give a shit, it doesn't cost them anything to spam the entire world and so they do.
Imagine if someone invented a soapbox that could broadcast the speakers voice all around the globe for 5 cents. Would you still be in favor of free speech when any idiot who wants to can drown out all other sounds? Because that is what spam is doing. It has become such a problem that it is flooding out regular emails.
Not that we really have free speech. The letters page in the newspaper is censored, same with feedback options on websites, try to put an ad in the newspaper that the newspaper doesn't want to publish, go ahead run an ad during the superbowl that shows titties, none of them are possible. We do NOT have free speech. Go ahead, hold a speech on the highway, seehow quickly you are taken of your soapbox. Go ahead get a sound installation and start your speech in the middle of the night in an urban area.
The reality is that in the real world free speech is extremely limited.
The internet for a whole gave us the idea that true free speech was possible. With usenet and email you could have you say and have everyone else pay for actually distributing it. This was a revolution. Imagine how it would be in the real world, you HAVE to subscribe to a newspaper that is forced into your hands every day. That newspaper contains all your personal mail so you HAVE to read it and anyone who wants to can put as much into that newspaper as they want. That is the internet.
It is an intresting idea, but sadly the bad guys as always ruined it. None of these spammers are intrested in expressing ideas into the world,they want to advertise their dodgy stuff for free.
There is a truth in the fact that if you want to defend free speech you got to defend speech you don't like as well, but do we do this?
No titties on tv, you can't just hang up your poster were ever you want, where when and how loud you make a public speech is heavily regulated. We DO NOT HAVE FREE SPEECH as in "you can say anything, whenever, however, wherever, you want."
So why should we think that the internet can be different?
We regulate speech in real life, contrary to what the parent thinks, junk-mail and telemarketing IS heavily regulated, see the DO-NOT-CALL list and truth in advertising laws. When did you ever receive a viagra junk-mail or telemarketing call?
TIME, that is what emergency services are all about. Swat, fire service, police, ambulance, when the call comes it is ALWAYS to be considered urgent.
I recently called 112, I heard some screaming from outside my window and it sounded real so I called them, without even yet knowing what the problem was, I gave the adress as I ran outside and saw smoke. I didn't even think but told the police dispatcher that there was a fire. Couple of minutes later a fire truck and ladder truck arrived plus an assortment of police. All for what turned out to be a small grease fire that had already been dealt with by neighbours alerted by what turned out to be a young kid who had wanted to fry some chips.
BUT what if it had been "real". They could have first send a guy a bike to check it out, he could have dealt with it. BUT that takes time and in an emergency every second counts, let alone the minutes sending a scout first would take.
As for your delusions of the police being able to snoop from the dispatchers office to see what goes on inside a random house. Go see a shrink, because you are insane. Really kid, get help, it is one thing to believe the CIA snoops on your calls, it is quite another to believe your local police has anything more sophisticated of seeing who is inside a house then to knock the door down. Stop watching TV, it ain't real.
Geez, you would think that on slashdot people would know the difference, this is prank calling, NOT phreaking. Phreaking is about getting free phone calls, not about causing a nuisance and most certainly NOT about sending swat teams out to third parties. A real phreaker would absolutly at no point consider causing harm to others (other then the phone company offcourse:P ) as even acceptable, let alone for it be the only goal.
This guy and others like it are at best doing prank calls and at worsed doing real harm to the people around them. How would you like to be really need the emergency services and find that they are out because some lunatic send them on a wild goose chase? How would you like it if swat stood on your doorstep.
What next, smashing somebodies face in and stealing their mobile is phreaking too?
Put this guy in jail, and if he is blind, well I am sure he can find a cellmate to show him the ropes. I am sick to death of the bleeding hearts, you do wrong, you go to jail. Just remember the thing about equality, all people should be equal for the law, and that means being blind or whatever doesn't get you out of jail.
The entire article is nothing more then the an out of context quote. Cnet heard something they think might sound nicely controversial, plunks it in in an article that seemingly has no goal and watches the ad revenue stream in when as predicted slashdot picks it up, makes an entire story out of one quote and runs rampant with it.
Personally I think this is all overblown, offcourse Sony who operates at the high end for laptops will call a move for the cheapest laptop a race to the bottom and warn that if this catches on "better watch out", but you note that completly absent from this article is any condemnation of this, neither do they warn consumers about the Eee. He might as well be meaning that those companies who think they can only sell super expensive ones better watch out.
Oh wait, I am doing it wrong ain't I. Sony is the evil!
The editors should really do a social experiment once with a story like this. Contact the original author and for a day fake a story like this and make it sound like it is about MS instead. Note who makes what kind of post, reveal the truth that the story was about Apple after all and then make each and every post eat his words.
Now offcourse there are differences, Apple isn't a monopoly for one, but I see a lot more people attempting to find excuses then if the picture had been about Billy Borg.
Undocumented API's are a hell, every programmer knows this, if nothing else they are an indication that the stuff you are working with is a bloody mess. Trust me on this, as far as I can follow the story between all the bending over backwards to appease the mighty Jobs, it is "just" a case of there being two API's, the official one that is supported and is the nice and proper, if a bit slower, method available to all 3rd party developers who program directly for the system, and the undocumented method that you can use if you use Apples own tools.
Oh dear god I come across that in the past, it is perfectly understandable, you often have to deal with legacy code even when you really want to get rid of it, you then write a new API but have to keep the old one around for backwards compatibilty and then find users who still use it. Still, it smells a lot of what MS has pulled in the past and I seen nothing but wishfull thinking that proofs Apple was completly in the clear when they did this.
Not that it really matters, Apple ain't big enough to abuse a monopoly, but it is still intresting to see Fanboys in action.
I pretty much agree with one sentiment from the original article, with opensource none of this would be possible. You can't have hidden stuff in the open.
Whenever the subject of IPv4 running out of addresses comes up, people suggest all kinds of solutions, from NAT to shared IP.
But in this case, the only reason the site still works is because it doesn't share its IP. It shows rather clearlty why having your own IP is so important.
I wonder what does who tag every IPv4 story with NAT have to say about this case. Offcourse you could argue that in no way does BILLION of people need to have their own IP in case some judge decides to take down your domain but still, we have to keep in mind when talking of tech solutions to this problem the social consequences. If this site had been "responsible" with its IP usage it would have been on a shared IP and used that for all its sister sites. It would work perfectly, until someone pulls the plug on you.
Goddamn, someone needs to kill this guy before any execs fresh to the job pick up on this idea. I say fresh to the job because any old hand will have seen this before. Portals. The days when the idea was that the web started at your ISP's home page. When every ISP had a newsfeed, poorly implemented, with no depth, but a ISP portal had to have the news, and so they bought the cheapest feed they could, implemented it badly and put it on the front page.
Filled offcourse with all sorts of content you could buy from the ISP, but not the actuall content that actually is bought on the net, PORN. Hell, I worked for one ISP were they had special code for the frontpage that would only display the porn links during the late hours. Not that it really worked, because invariable the ISP content sucked compared to what was available on the real net. McNealy? The 1980's called, they want their AOL back.
The problem is that it sounds so logical. If you do not provide food services on your train stations dear transport company, then someone else will. It forms quit a bit of income, all those stands, often at least partially owned by the train company itself. It used to be they even provided pretty decent service.
Ever seen a gas station that just sold gas?
So why doesn't the same go for ISP's selling content? Because the train station example has one simple advantage. LOCATION. When I travel by train it is easier to use the supplied services at the station then go outside and get food there.
The same does NOT go for ISP's. I can switch between content sides at the press of a button, there is absolutly no reason for me to visit my ISP's newsfeed when I can go straight to the source. Why should I buy music from my ISP when iTunes is just a click away? Why should I use their branded search engine when google is just a click away?
IF ISP's had a form of lockin it makes sense, say that visiting the BBC news site cost me money and my ISP's Reuters newsfeed was free then I could easily see that some people would choose the inferior but cheap option.
Just a couple of minutes from Arnhem train station was a fast food shop with really good self-made snacks, cheaper as well, compared to the concesion stand at the station itself, but still, because it is hassle to walk the detour the crappy snacks at the station fetched a higher price.
The idea itself works, it just doesn't work for the Internet.
The older people among us know this, because it has been tried. In fact many a customer got so fed up with it, that entirely new companies jumped in the market ADVERTISING with the fact that they offered JUST internet access and nothing more.
And lets face it, it is a lot easier for the ISP's. If they sell music then they got to haggle with record companies, invest in servers, deal with complaints. If they don't sell music, they collect for the transmission of the music their customers get from whatever company is wiling to risk it. You know, my ISP EVEN gets its money when I pirate music. Let iTunes worry about what the record labels will do next, my ISP just transmits the data and gets paid for it.
No McNealy, you sometimes seem almost clever, but this article marks you as just another tie without a clue.
This fine is going to have be paid in cold hard cash. Not vouchers, not rebates. CASH.
That doesn't hurt MS revenue at all offcourse. Their revenue will remain the same, what this will hurt is their profit. 900 million euro's down the drain with no way to write it off hurts.
You also got to remember that this is just the total so far, this isn't a speeding ticket, the amount will go up and up as long as MS doesn't comply.
There are also other problems. The US is going to look a bit silly now with its own weak settlement. Exactly how many goverments are looking at this case and thinking "Mmm, I sure could use a couple of hundred millions while fighting for my citizens rights".
No this hurts MS, not enough to bankrupt it, but even a company the size of MS can't just cough up a billion without it hurting and the end is so far not in sight.
But you are right about their revenue, all those idiots who claim that MS could just pull out of the EU forget that that would cost MS far more money.
First of, wearing a tie or not has nothing to do with your actual competence. Neither is all of IT about tech. Corporate IT is far more then "just" the programmers and the managers. Some of the best people I have met over the years were not all that hot on the tech site but still good IT workers because they could bridge the gaps between the tech guys and the customer.
I am a bit suspicious of either extreme when it comes to dress code. Some people just don't fit in suits (I am one of them) while others only competence is to look good in one. I had this situation years ago when I worked for a small company and didn't have my driving license. I would be sent to the customer with a guy who drove me, that was really all he was good for IT wise, he just didn't have a clue, but he sure did look good in a suit. It was pretty common for us to arrive at the customer and for them to mistake him as the "boss" and me as the helper. I couldn't blame them but it did proof to me that people look at the tie first, competence second (if you are lucky).
However those cases were ALWAYS when the good looking people had screwed up and I had to come in to clean up, so this helped to make me acceptablebecause by this time the bosses were screaming and most bosses are rather down to earth and don't give a shit what the person who shovels the shit away looks like just as long as he is fast. But that doesn't make it any easier to get hired in the first place or to get the "easy" projects, we had a number of customers were I would only go under escort by sales because they had to provide a shield as it were of being dressed right to keep up appearances. A large customer dealing with real estate was one of them, everyone was in suits there, I looked like I was coming to pick up the trash, so thinking back to it we sorta send in the sales guy first to blind them with his outfit so I could do the tech work. For a lot of corporate IT SELLING your tech skills by putting it in a nice package is just as important as having the skills in the first place.
If you are detached somewhere where a full suit and tie is the regular dresscode they are going to have to be sold on your expensive contract by someone they can relate too. If you are REALLY good then a competent sales guy can sell your sandals but you better be REALLY good and you have to accept that for jobs were a really good guy ain't needed, they prefer to sell the guy who is easier on the eyes.
Mind you, there some far nastier versions of this. Females whose skills are sold disguised behind a male because tech guys can't possibly have tits. Don't even get me started on race issues.
Looks matter in the business world where everyone is always trying to sell you something. Goverment and education are different, goverment typically is run by people who just stuck with it for decades and education is were everyone who is to weird ends up, but in "business" it is everyone for themselves and you constantly have to sell yourselve.
So do you have to wear a tie? Well it all depends on what role you have. When you are coding at home or your own office, who cares. When you go to implement it, well, it isn't very comfortable. At the launch party? People should know how good you are by now. But when it is time to sell yourselve, then yes, it is just polite to dress up a bit. In sales, you dress up and if you are unlucky enough to have to be part of the selling of your skills, then looking right helps. A good IT company will help the hopeless with that. I simply arranged at one company that they dressed the worsed offenders of us. Because while going in jeans and a t-shirt is bad, it is even worse if you force these guys to buy a suit because they will screw it up. Send them out shopping at a good store that helps them pick the right outfit and have the company pay for it, keep it at the office and let the secretary handle keeping it clean. Let the people with a clue to dresscode handle the dressing, it might sound childish but it does work and offcourse in plenty of
If you read up a bit about the guy you get the idea of a man who once had an idea for an intresting game, that game was mostly made succesfull by others partly because he was behind the iron curtain. Then when the curtain lifted he instantly ran away and grapped the cash on offer (rather then say found a software company in his own country) from Microsoft who got a couple of half-assed games in return.
And now he complains about FOSS destroying wealth.
Better sell my IBM shares then.
FOSS does a simple thing, it changes the flow of money, rather then the author of the software getting the money (or at least the person who owns the software, as this guy himself should know, the inventor/writer isn't always the one who ends up with the cash) the money stays with the user of FOSS so he can spend it on other things.
By NOT buying Vista for my new PC I could instead spend the cash on extra hardware. The local computer store didn't give a shit, I still spend the same amount. The trucking company shifting the goods didn't give a shit, roughly the same size box. The bank handling the transaction didn't give a shit. In the end the only people who noted was a memory company and MS. The memory company ends up with more money, MS with less. Does this matter on a global scale? No. Wealth hasn't been destroyed, it has merely been re-distrubuted.
Mmm, he longer works for MS, I wonder wether he was fired after MS went bankrupt because I used gentoo rather then XP for my file server.
Subtle flaw, FEMALE fish can count to four
on
Fish Can Count to Four
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· Score: 2, Funny
They tested the behaviour of FEMALE fish, not male ones. We know that in humans women are not as good at the hard sciences as men are. Offcourse counting to four barely classifies as hard science, except maybe in Utah, but still.
Still the article makes me wonder, how do we count. I am currently looking at the number of open tasks on my taskbar, there are 5, I counted four instantly. I am now trying to convince myself that this is because the fifth "icon" is where in previous KDE versions part of the start menu was so that I overlooked it and not that I have the brains of a fish. A female fish. Some hard liqour maybe inorder, although sadly I then also frequently have a problem counting past the fourth drink.
Oh and what happened to small goverment? Isn't the goverment giving ratings to ISP another enlargment of the goverment? A rating system for ISP's operated out of taxes? Come on right wing nutcases, don't let us down, STRIKE THIS BIG GOVERMENT PROPOSAL DOWN! Your taxes are at stake!
I reckon that right wingers may care little about freedom, but we can get them excited at the prospect of having to pay more taxes.
Does the article have ANYTHING to say about the phone companies giving in to these demands?
I DEMAND YOU GO AND KILL YOURSELVE!
Take that world, obviously I rule you since I can demand you kill yourselve.
Oh, you are not going to give into my demands, well that ain't nice.
Oh and if the taliban is winning, why are they then so worried about the phone network? I think it is a sign of them loosing.
But you don't want to hear logic, you just want to slam the war, go right ahead but do realize you sound like a bit of a twit when you link making demands (which so far have not even been replied to one way or the other) shows who is control. People in control don't make demands, they dictate.
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The problem is that the content products like movies, music even books try to pretend they are normal products until it comes time to actually discuss profit margins and production costs.
You would say that if a movie cost X to produce then if it made a box office result of X+Y that Y would be profit? It don't work like that, extremely successfull movies that break box-office records can nonetheless show a LOSS. Hollywood style accounting would get you arrested in any other field, but somehow we tolerate it because... well you got to wonder why it is tolerated.
It seems rather convenient that the movie industry is allowed to just inflate its costs on all of its products until they rather handily do not show a profit. Say I create an item, a painting, I put itup for auction, then as the price goes higher and higher I keep increasing the costs of the paint I used so that even if my simple pencil drawing started out with a cost of a penny, if it sells for a million, it cost me a million and a penny to produce.
Idiotic? Well it happens all the time in movies, just look at the Spiderman movies and Lord of the Rings trilogy. Products that OBVIOUSLY had more revenue then cost but that is NOT what the final account says.
I know this will shock americans, but it is high time the state steps in and regulates the content industry. Offcourse that won't happen, any politician who dares regulate hollywood will be torn to shreds by the media.
And we swallow it, what is the favorite show of Slashdot? Futurama? How many eps show rampant anti-piracy propoganda? A show were turning humans into a softdrink is perfectly fine, but copyright infringement is an evil that deserves an entire episode.
We are controlled by the media, as long as the media can set public opinion they can abuse this by making sure politicians who do what they want them to do get noticed, and the ones who go against get buried.
Oh and don't think for a second that the content industry cares one shit about censorship. Ratings, a fine for a nipple? All part of charade. In exchange for allowing Hollywood to make its own economic rules, the politicians are allowed to introduce simplistic and ineffective self regulation.
And no, this is NOT a conspiracy theorie, there are no shadowy meetings in which this is arranged, it is just how things work. Conspiracy theorists are dreamers, idealists who hope that there is a clear enemy who no matter how powerfull can ultimately be overcome one day.
Real life don't work that way, there is just an understanding. Politicians leave the content producers alone, and the content producers won't tear them a new hole in the public eye.
Ever wonder why we think Kerry was a stiff, Al Gore to intellectual? Who do you think put that image in our minds? Watch the media very carefully and see how every person who is the smallest threath to the way things are done is assasinated.
Just imagine how you would react to a Jay Leno monologue about a senator who wishes to put the IRS in charge of examing hollywoods finanicials. How many seconds do you think he would need to tear this guy down and the audience swallowing it hook line and sinker?
The politicians KNOW this, the media controls the public so they can never control them.
Some people believe a free press is needed to keep goverment in check, but who keeps the media in check? Examine the politics in England and how newspaper support for one party or the other can swing the election. The media is the watchdog, but who watches the watcher? The public? Yeah right, they only know what the media tells them.
Ebay is closer to an auction engine, it suplies the tool but the SELLER is the one who is the auctioneer, this is odd because usually in auctions there is a threesome going on. Seller, Buyers and Auctioneer. The auctioneer is the middle man and makes sure BOTH sides keep up their side of the bargain.
The whole thing about negative feedback doesn't happen in real auction houses. Rememeber that deal with the vizors of the La Forge not being the real one worn by the actor? Was it the seller OR christies who took the heat for that? Answer,the auction house, they accepted the item and certified it as being real.
If I buy something at an auction I pay the auction house and THEY hand me the item. E-bay is a far cry from this and people forget this.
Auction houses are an ancient invention, there is a REASON they work the way they do so it is only natural that when ebay tries to change this ancient process problems will occur.
If ebay worked like a normal auction house then there wouldn't be any problems other then the typical buyer beware, but that is try anywhere.
Netflix is an american company, that makes me presume you are an american. American's do NOT watch subs, you did. Netflix therefor assumes you like foreign movies. Its programmer did NOT include the option that you were simply a snob. It is an oversight, there are plenty of people who only watch movies from certain foreign countries, but Netflix apparently just considers you as a person willing to deal with foreign languages.
Oh and you taste is indeed lobsided, I too watch japanese movies, but also those from hong-kong, korea, china etc etc. Granted it is easier if you limit yourselve in some way, but I would welcome a system that would truly be capable of recommending movies of my taste and language would NOT be a criteria I want to be considered. I happily watch a signed movie, with subtitles of course how is that for irony!, if it was the kind I liked. Sadly no such system yet exists (I am not from the US so can't even try netflix).
You watch the movies to learn the language, fair enough but do you really expect a commercial company to accomodate your needs with a recommendation system? You don't need that you just need a searchable database that records the language.
A recommendation system is to recommend movies that fit your taste, not an absolute requirement. This is what makes it so hard. Say I like Whispers of the heart, a japanese animated coming of age movie. Should it then recommend to me other anime movies? No. Should it then recommend to me other japanese movies? No. Should it then recommend to me other coming of age movies? Almost! Should it recommend movies that have a similar feel to the one I liked? YES!
That is why it is so hard. Your requirements are simple and IMDB can do it for you, but recommending a movie based on a list of other movies you like without just listing the obvious is a LOT harder.
That limited editions sell? That is NOTHING NEW. They ALWAYS SOLD, which is why you can't move for special editions. The RIAA KNOWS that limited box sets sell, all this does is confirm it.
The limited box set being available for 300 dollars is NOT the news item, neither is him making lots of money by selling directly to the consumer, the RIAA knows this as well. They KNOW you make the most money if you are the one doingthe selling, that is why they want to continue doing the selling.
The new bit was the rather large free sample andhis relaxed attitude to copying the rest, but again, a lot of artists have been relaxed about copyright from the start. It is the music labels that think copying is evil!
So by all means, cheer the eventual death of the major record labels and their fronts, but don't think that a limited box set making lots of money for the guy selling it is going to suddenly wake them up. This is old news to them.
Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?
Oh sure DESKTOP HD's are getting bigger all the time but what is a blue-ray or HD-DVD movie, 40-50 GB? That means a large HD can only hold 10 movies. Not much if you consider how many DVD's movie BUYERS got. Some people I know got large enough collection to stretch the capacity of pro-sumer level NAT storage, how the fuck are they going to find enough computer storage to store all this in HD?
Then offcourse you need to hook up this storage to the TV, how is this done?
Oh yes, there are solutions and workarounds a plenty, but I don't see any it being adopted anytime soon, just as MOVIE projectors BEFORE VHS were NOT popular.Oh right, some of you younger ones may not know this. No VHS did NOT mean the start of the movie rental business. It was available LONG before. You could always just rent a projector and some movies and real enthousiats had their own setup. But it was far to much of a hassle for the general public.
VHS made it easy NOT just to record your own shows, but to simply pop down the corner rental story, rent a movie and watch it.
This lead to a huge boom in the industry for a bit with countless stores opening.
It lost its luster a bit, partially because many more TV channels became available all catering to their own crowd. Simply watching whatever the tube feeds you after all is still easier.
But watch HD movies from a PC, that is a lot of hassle, NO, we on slashdot CANNOT judge this. People who compile their own kernel are naturally going to be a bit more inclined to be tech savy then those whose VCR has a blinking clock.
iTunes? iTunes is a joke, its sales are pathetic if you consider the market it operates in. Do the math, how many BILLIONS of consumers does it reach and how many SONGS (SONGS! Not full albums) has it sold? iTunes is the biggest online store, but compared to offline sales it just doesn't compare.
There have been several attempt at on-demand and download services and THEY ALL FAILED.
Don't get me wrong, it is OBVIOUSLY the future, but the future ain't here yet. At the moment we just don't have the tech to handle that amount of content without a shiny disc to put it on.
What people tend to forget is how slow things really change. DVD's didn't replace VHS for years. LP's sold for ages beside CD's. Digital download has been a dream for as long the internet came into existence and it just isn't ready yet. Just ask youtube why they don't serve all their vidoes in HD. Their servers, would choke and it would mean you would have to pick your movie now if you want to watch it over the weekend.
And then their is that shiny Blu-Ray disc in a store or rental place, you can pick it up, slot it in and watch it. No PC whining, no ISP complaining, no harddisk screaming for mercy. It just works.
I think downloads are going to have to wait a bit until those parts of the world who are willing to pay for their content can get their downloads as easy as a disc.
The guy tried to sell a pair of bikes for 600 dollars, then received a check for 2000 dollars, and tried to cash it in. He then claims he found that suspicious and all, sure he did AFTER THE FACT! It wouldn't look good in court to say "I thought it was my lucky day receiving more then TRIPLE the amount we agreed".
WHOOOP, WHOOOP, WHOOOP! Red FLAG!
The article explains that this is part of a scam and you can't scam an honest person. What honest person would believe that someone sends more then 200% of the price to cover transport and as a bonus? Isn't the whole point of buying second hand to SAVE costs? How much are these bikes worth in the first place?
No the guy got greedy, and paid for it with being arrested. The bank itself did nothing wrong, they behaved EXACTLY as they should have. So did the police.
Sadly this guy was a victim of scammers, and partly his own greed. The scammers were the ones who send him the check that got him arrested. His own greed helped because without this particulair scam wouldn't have worked (the article explains the scam) but if the scammer had wanted the bikes without paying he would still have been arrested, if the check had been for a single dollar, he would stillhave been arrested.
Blame the scammers, not the bank or the police.
A lot of workplaces will have physically secured machines but nonetheless with ports open. People might notice if you remove a server from a rack to access its insides, but just plugging in a cable?
Yes offcourse, not that many machines have firewire and servers are even rarer (although my pc has a port) but still, there is a major difference between the access needed to open a PC and gets its HD and just plugging in a cable.
See it as the difference between having to steal secret documents and being able to copy them at the spot.
If this tools indeed works in seconds then that is a lot faster then opening up a PC, taking out its HD, installing it in another machine, breaking its security, reading the contents you want (which at this point would give you only the contents on the HD, not the network), re-installing it and closing the cover and removing every trace of your access.
A lot of security is about inconvenience. Safes ain't rated for being unbreakable, but how long it takes to open them. ANY safe can be opened, the trick is making the process take so long that it can not be done without being found out. Thanks to MS, breaking its security has just become a lot more convenient.
What do you think they are converting you lamebrain? They kept the originals, so no upsampling needed (doesn't really work anyway), they just RE-encode the original.
Unfortunately what works for Radiohead isn't necessarily going to work for other musicians.
This was an often heard comment after Radiohead did it.
You update it to:
Unfortunately what works for Radiohead and NIN isn't necessarily going to work for other musicians.
Next band:
Unfortunately what works for Radiohead and NIN and Band X isn't necessarily going to work for other musicians.
Give it a couple of years and your comment will be marked informative for being the definitive list of every musician still active.
Do yourselve a favor, don't copy & past the same lousy comment from the radiohead thread and just insert the various band names, sooner or later you are going to look pretty silly.
Oh and giving your music away for free is nothing new, new bands do it all the time, in fact I still got a tape that my mother got from Peter Blanker (dutch artist, not that famous himself but wrote a lot of lyrics for others), specially 'mixed' to have his adult songs on one side and kids songs on the other.
A friend of mine is into alternative music, REALLY alternative, think music where they burn 10 cd's and 9 go to the "press" and the rest to the fan (yes I spelled it correctly). The difference here is that TWO big sellers have decided that this new method makes more sense for them.
Oh and as for it getting stale, tell the porn industry when they launch yet another starlet. The consumer is an ever hungry beast. There can never be enough new content out there.
Anything that stimulates you is bad, you want the brain to be inactive, doing ANYTHING before you go to sleep therefor is bad. If you really want to sleep well do so in a DARK, SILENT room with no stimuli, don't read in bed, don't talk in bed, don't watch tv etc etc. It also helps if the room is a bit colder then you would keep the living room.
I agree with the rest, with 10 or more hours spend on working, several more on chores, who indeed has time to sleep? It is one reason I really miss an old job where I only worked 6 hours and could start early. It left the afternoon free to do all the stuff you have to do like cleaning and shopping, and you could fully enjoy your evening. Looking back I was far better off back then, but offcourse you never know how good you have it till it is gone.
It just doesn't fit in our life-style of non-tiring but time-consuming work to have to switch of for a 1/3 of a day every day. No, catching up on your sleep in the weekend ain't no good either. Intelligent Design? My foot!
The west 'solved' it with immigration. Tell me, how long did those riots last in France?
How many bombs have been set-off by this solution?
Until japan gets the first downtown areas that are no-go areas with out of control robots, or get to deal with robot terrorists, who are we to say there way is wrong.
Their country, their way of dealing with lifes problems.
The idea of free speech in a truly unlimited form has been overtaken by technology.
When the constitution was written, printing presses were still new and therefor expensive to own and operate. It was easy to say "everyone can say what they want when they want" when in reality this meant you either stood on a soapbox in a corner of a park. Sure you could print a leaflet but that cost money, want it distributed, that costs even more. Reality made sure that free speech was very hard to excersise.
E-mail has changed everything, a spammer can send millions of emails at little to no cost. You mention junk-mail, sure that is a nuisance but the MAILER has to pay serious cash to do it. I happen to know that mass mail campaigns are very carefull of what areas their "spam" because of the high costs, if there ain't a store near enough to a town or suburb, that one is skipped because they know they won't be getting any meaningfull response anyway. Area too poor or to rich? Don't get the mail either. It may not seem like it but junk mail is caefully pruned to make sure it only arrives at those houses where people might be intrested.
An email spammer doesn't give a shit, it doesn't cost them anything to spam the entire world and so they do.
Imagine if someone invented a soapbox that could broadcast the speakers voice all around the globe for 5 cents. Would you still be in favor of free speech when any idiot who wants to can drown out all other sounds? Because that is what spam is doing. It has become such a problem that it is flooding out regular emails.
Not that we really have free speech. The letters page in the newspaper is censored, same with feedback options on websites, try to put an ad in the newspaper that the newspaper doesn't want to publish, go ahead run an ad during the superbowl that shows titties, none of them are possible. We do NOT have free speech. Go ahead, hold a speech on the highway, seehow quickly you are taken of your soapbox. Go ahead get a sound installation and start your speech in the middle of the night in an urban area.
The reality is that in the real world free speech is extremely limited.
The internet for a whole gave us the idea that true free speech was possible. With usenet and email you could have you say and have everyone else pay for actually distributing it. This was a revolution. Imagine how it would be in the real world, you HAVE to subscribe to a newspaper that is forced into your hands every day. That newspaper contains all your personal mail so you HAVE to read it and anyone who wants to can put as much into that newspaper as they want. That is the internet.
It is an intresting idea, but sadly the bad guys as always ruined it. None of these spammers are intrested in expressing ideas into the world,they want to advertise their dodgy stuff for free.
There is a truth in the fact that if you want to defend free speech you got to defend speech you don't like as well, but do we do this?
No titties on tv, you can't just hang up your poster were ever you want, where when and how loud you make a public speech is heavily regulated. We DO NOT HAVE FREE SPEECH as in "you can say anything, whenever, however, wherever, you want."
So why should we think that the internet can be different?
We regulate speech in real life, contrary to what the parent thinks, junk-mail and telemarketing IS heavily regulated, see the DO-NOT-CALL list and truth in advertising laws. When did you ever receive a viagra junk-mail or telemarketing call?
TIME, that is what emergency services are all about. Swat, fire service, police, ambulance, when the call comes it is ALWAYS to be considered urgent.
I recently called 112, I heard some screaming from outside my window and it sounded real so I called them, without even yet knowing what the problem was, I gave the adress as I ran outside and saw smoke. I didn't even think but told the police dispatcher that there was a fire. Couple of minutes later a fire truck and ladder truck arrived plus an assortment of police. All for what turned out to be a small grease fire that had already been dealt with by neighbours alerted by what turned out to be a young kid who had wanted to fry some chips.
BUT what if it had been "real". They could have first send a guy a bike to check it out, he could have dealt with it. BUT that takes time and in an emergency every second counts, let alone the minutes sending a scout first would take.
As for your delusions of the police being able to snoop from the dispatchers office to see what goes on inside a random house. Go see a shrink, because you are insane. Really kid, get help, it is one thing to believe the CIA snoops on your calls, it is quite another to believe your local police has anything more sophisticated of seeing who is inside a house then to knock the door down. Stop watching TV, it ain't real.
You got issues mate, have them seen too.
Geez, you would think that on slashdot people would know the difference, this is prank calling, NOT phreaking. Phreaking is about getting free phone calls, not about causing a nuisance and most certainly NOT about sending swat teams out to third parties. A real phreaker would absolutly at no point consider causing harm to others (other then the phone company offcourse :P ) as even acceptable, let alone for it be the only goal.
This guy and others like it are at best doing prank calls and at worsed doing real harm to the people around them. How would you like to be really need the emergency services and find that they are out because some lunatic send them on a wild goose chase? How would you like it if swat stood on your doorstep.
What next, smashing somebodies face in and stealing their mobile is phreaking too?
Put this guy in jail, and if he is blind, well I am sure he can find a cellmate to show him the ropes. I am sick to death of the bleeding hearts, you do wrong, you go to jail. Just remember the thing about equality, all people should be equal for the law, and that means being blind or whatever doesn't get you out of jail.
The entire article is nothing more then the an out of context quote. Cnet heard something they think might sound nicely controversial, plunks it in in an article that seemingly has no goal and watches the ad revenue stream in when as predicted slashdot picks it up, makes an entire story out of one quote and runs rampant with it.
Personally I think this is all overblown, offcourse Sony who operates at the high end for laptops will call a move for the cheapest laptop a race to the bottom and warn that if this catches on "better watch out", but you note that completly absent from this article is any condemnation of this, neither do they warn consumers about the Eee. He might as well be meaning that those companies who think they can only sell super expensive ones better watch out.
Oh wait, I am doing it wrong ain't I. Sony is the evil!
The editors should really do a social experiment once with a story like this. Contact the original author and for a day fake a story like this and make it sound like it is about MS instead. Note who makes what kind of post, reveal the truth that the story was about Apple after all and then make each and every post eat his words.
Now offcourse there are differences, Apple isn't a monopoly for one, but I see a lot more people attempting to find excuses then if the picture had been about Billy Borg.
Undocumented API's are a hell, every programmer knows this, if nothing else they are an indication that the stuff you are working with is a bloody mess. Trust me on this, as far as I can follow the story between all the bending over backwards to appease the mighty Jobs, it is "just" a case of there being two API's, the official one that is supported and is the nice and proper, if a bit slower, method available to all 3rd party developers who program directly for the system, and the undocumented method that you can use if you use Apples own tools.
Oh dear god I come across that in the past, it is perfectly understandable, you often have to deal with legacy code even when you really want to get rid of it, you then write a new API but have to keep the old one around for backwards compatibilty and then find users who still use it. Still, it smells a lot of what MS has pulled in the past and I seen nothing but wishfull thinking that proofs Apple was completly in the clear when they did this.
Not that it really matters, Apple ain't big enough to abuse a monopoly, but it is still intresting to see Fanboys in action.
I pretty much agree with one sentiment from the original article, with opensource none of this would be possible. You can't have hidden stuff in the open.
Whenever the subject of IPv4 running out of addresses comes up, people suggest all kinds of solutions, from NAT to shared IP.
But in this case, the only reason the site still works is because it doesn't share its IP. It shows rather clearlty why having your own IP is so important.
I wonder what does who tag every IPv4 story with NAT have to say about this case. Offcourse you could argue that in no way does BILLION of people need to have their own IP in case some judge decides to take down your domain but still, we have to keep in mind when talking of tech solutions to this problem the social consequences. If this site had been "responsible" with its IP usage it would have been on a shared IP and used that for all its sister sites. It would work perfectly, until someone pulls the plug on you.
Goddamn, someone needs to kill this guy before any execs fresh to the job pick up on this idea. I say fresh to the job because any old hand will have seen this before. Portals. The days when the idea was that the web started at your ISP's home page. When every ISP had a newsfeed, poorly implemented, with no depth, but a ISP portal had to have the news, and so they bought the cheapest feed they could, implemented it badly and put it on the front page.
Filled offcourse with all sorts of content you could buy from the ISP, but not the actuall content that actually is bought on the net, PORN. Hell, I worked for one ISP were they had special code for the frontpage that would only display the porn links during the late hours. Not that it really worked, because invariable the ISP content sucked compared to what was available on the real net. McNealy? The 1980's called, they want their AOL back.
The problem is that it sounds so logical. If you do not provide food services on your train stations dear transport company, then someone else will. It forms quit a bit of income, all those stands, often at least partially owned by the train company itself. It used to be they even provided pretty decent service.
Ever seen a gas station that just sold gas?
So why doesn't the same go for ISP's selling content? Because the train station example has one simple advantage. LOCATION. When I travel by train it is easier to use the supplied services at the station then go outside and get food there.
The same does NOT go for ISP's. I can switch between content sides at the press of a button, there is absolutly no reason for me to visit my ISP's newsfeed when I can go straight to the source. Why should I buy music from my ISP when iTunes is just a click away? Why should I use their branded search engine when google is just a click away?
IF ISP's had a form of lockin it makes sense, say that visiting the BBC news site cost me money and my ISP's Reuters newsfeed was free then I could easily see that some people would choose the inferior but cheap option.
Just a couple of minutes from Arnhem train station was a fast food shop with really good self-made snacks, cheaper as well, compared to the concesion stand at the station itself, but still, because it is hassle to walk the detour the crappy snacks at the station fetched a higher price.
The idea itself works, it just doesn't work for the Internet.
The older people among us know this, because it has been tried. In fact many a customer got so fed up with it, that entirely new companies jumped in the market ADVERTISING with the fact that they offered JUST internet access and nothing more.
And lets face it, it is a lot easier for the ISP's. If they sell music then they got to haggle with record companies, invest in servers, deal with complaints. If they don't sell music, they collect for the transmission of the music their customers get from whatever company is wiling to risk it. You know, my ISP EVEN gets its money when I pirate music. Let iTunes worry about what the record labels will do next, my ISP just transmits the data and gets paid for it.
No McNealy, you sometimes seem almost clever, but this article marks you as just another tie without a clue.
You are trying to sell portals. No thanks.
This fine is going to have be paid in cold hard cash. Not vouchers, not rebates. CASH.
That doesn't hurt MS revenue at all offcourse. Their revenue will remain the same, what this will hurt is their profit. 900 million euro's down the drain with no way to write it off hurts.
You also got to remember that this is just the total so far, this isn't a speeding ticket, the amount will go up and up as long as MS doesn't comply.
There are also other problems. The US is going to look a bit silly now with its own weak settlement. Exactly how many goverments are looking at this case and thinking "Mmm, I sure could use a couple of hundred millions while fighting for my citizens rights".
No this hurts MS, not enough to bankrupt it, but even a company the size of MS can't just cough up a billion without it hurting and the end is so far not in sight.
But you are right about their revenue, all those idiots who claim that MS could just pull out of the EU forget that that would cost MS far more money.
Porntcha slashdot style 1: Just how many libraries of congress would fit in this anus?
Porntcha slashdot style 2: How many girls can you see using this cup?
Porntcha slashdot style 3: What marine animal is this girl trying to emulate in the tub?
If you have no idea what images/movies these questions refer to, consider yourselve lucky.
First of, wearing a tie or not has nothing to do with your actual competence. Neither is all of IT about tech. Corporate IT is far more then "just" the programmers and the managers. Some of the best people I have met over the years were not all that hot on the tech site but still good IT workers because they could bridge the gaps between the tech guys and the customer.
I am a bit suspicious of either extreme when it comes to dress code. Some people just don't fit in suits (I am one of them) while others only competence is to look good in one. I had this situation years ago when I worked for a small company and didn't have my driving license. I would be sent to the customer with a guy who drove me, that was really all he was good for IT wise, he just didn't have a clue, but he sure did look good in a suit. It was pretty common for us to arrive at the customer and for them to mistake him as the "boss" and me as the helper. I couldn't blame them but it did proof to me that people look at the tie first, competence second (if you are lucky).
However those cases were ALWAYS when the good looking people had screwed up and I had to come in to clean up, so this helped to make me acceptablebecause by this time the bosses were screaming and most bosses are rather down to earth and don't give a shit what the person who shovels the shit away looks like just as long as he is fast. But that doesn't make it any easier to get hired in the first place or to get the "easy" projects, we had a number of customers were I would only go under escort by sales because they had to provide a shield as it were of being dressed right to keep up appearances. A large customer dealing with real estate was one of them, everyone was in suits there, I looked like I was coming to pick up the trash, so thinking back to it we sorta send in the sales guy first to blind them with his outfit so I could do the tech work. For a lot of corporate IT SELLING your tech skills by putting it in a nice package is just as important as having the skills in the first place.
If you are detached somewhere where a full suit and tie is the regular dresscode they are going to have to be sold on your expensive contract by someone they can relate too. If you are REALLY good then a competent sales guy can sell your sandals but you better be REALLY good and you have to accept that for jobs were a really good guy ain't needed, they prefer to sell the guy who is easier on the eyes.
Mind you, there some far nastier versions of this. Females whose skills are sold disguised behind a male because tech guys can't possibly have tits. Don't even get me started on race issues.
Looks matter in the business world where everyone is always trying to sell you something. Goverment and education are different, goverment typically is run by people who just stuck with it for decades and education is were everyone who is to weird ends up, but in "business" it is everyone for themselves and you constantly have to sell yourselve.
So do you have to wear a tie? Well it all depends on what role you have. When you are coding at home or your own office, who cares. When you go to implement it, well, it isn't very comfortable. At the launch party? People should know how good you are by now. But when it is time to sell yourselve, then yes, it is just polite to dress up a bit. In sales, you dress up and if you are unlucky enough to have to be part of the selling of your skills, then looking right helps. A good IT company will help the hopeless with that. I simply arranged at one company that they dressed the worsed offenders of us. Because while going in jeans and a t-shirt is bad, it is even worse if you force these guys to buy a suit because they will screw it up. Send them out shopping at a good store that helps them pick the right outfit and have the company pay for it, keep it at the office and let the secretary handle keeping it clean. Let the people with a clue to dresscode handle the dressing, it might sound childish but it does work and offcourse in plenty of
If you read up a bit about the guy you get the idea of a man who once had an idea for an intresting game, that game was mostly made succesfull by others partly because he was behind the iron curtain. Then when the curtain lifted he instantly ran away and grapped the cash on offer (rather then say found a software company in his own country) from Microsoft who got a couple of half-assed games in return.
And now he complains about FOSS destroying wealth.
Better sell my IBM shares then.
FOSS does a simple thing, it changes the flow of money, rather then the author of the software getting the money (or at least the person who owns the software, as this guy himself should know, the inventor/writer isn't always the one who ends up with the cash) the money stays with the user of FOSS so he can spend it on other things.
By NOT buying Vista for my new PC I could instead spend the cash on extra hardware. The local computer store didn't give a shit, I still spend the same amount. The trucking company shifting the goods didn't give a shit, roughly the same size box. The bank handling the transaction didn't give a shit. In the end the only people who noted was a memory company and MS. The memory company ends up with more money, MS with less. Does this matter on a global scale? No. Wealth hasn't been destroyed, it has merely been re-distrubuted.
Mmm, he longer works for MS, I wonder wether he was fired after MS went bankrupt because I used gentoo rather then XP for my file server.
They tested the behaviour of FEMALE fish, not male ones. We know that in humans women are not as good at the hard sciences as men are. Offcourse counting to four barely classifies as hard science, except maybe in Utah, but still.
Still the article makes me wonder, how do we count. I am currently looking at the number of open tasks on my taskbar, there are 5, I counted four instantly. I am now trying to convince myself that this is because the fifth "icon" is where in previous KDE versions part of the start menu was so that I overlooked it and not that I have the brains of a fish. A female fish. Some hard liqour maybe inorder, although sadly I then also frequently have a problem counting past the fourth drink.
F for Freedom!
Oh and what happened to small goverment? Isn't the goverment giving ratings to ISP another enlargment of the goverment? A rating system for ISP's operated out of taxes? Come on right wing nutcases, don't let us down, STRIKE THIS BIG GOVERMENT PROPOSAL DOWN! Your taxes are at stake!
I reckon that right wingers may care little about freedom, but we can get them excited at the prospect of having to pay more taxes.
Does the article have ANYTHING to say about the phone companies giving in to these demands?
I DEMAND YOU GO AND KILL YOURSELVE!
Take that world, obviously I rule you since I can demand you kill yourselve.
Oh, you are not going to give into my demands, well that ain't nice.
Oh and if the taliban is winning, why are they then so worried about the phone network? I think it is a sign of them loosing.
But you don't want to hear logic, you just want to slam the war, go right ahead but do realize you sound like a bit of a twit when you link making demands (which so far have not even been replied to one way or the other) shows who is control. People in control don't make demands, they dictate.