But there are plenty of other countries where state regulation of industries like broadband, other telecoms, transportation, energy (gas and electric) and television do result in better service for the consumer at less cost. So why is that these schemes always fail in the states yet in other countries they work fine?
In europe regulatory bodies seem to have alot more success with out becomming corrupted by the companies they are supposed to regulate. I know absolutely nothing about why these things happen in the US (hence me asking this question) but I do know that the most widely known failures we have had in the UK along similar lines is in Food and Farming regulations or advertising, both of which are expected to get funding from the companies they are supposed to be keeping under control. Obviously this causes a conflict of interest. In the case of farming this resulted in some really great fuckups (Foot and Mouth, BSE).
I think the key to the successful regulation is giving the body in question generous funding and also the teeth to back any threats. Would the US constitution allow the government to form a body which could effectively dictate prices to a company without the company getting any say in the matter? Would anyone in america actually vote for a government that did such things or would they get labelled as communists long before they came into office?
I wasnt specifically talking about the world war 2 work. Look at the bit a little further down with regard to inventing RSA encryption then not telling anyone util after the inventor had died.
The fact is that the most recent thing they would publish now is something they did in the 70's. Anything more recent than that is still classsified. Alot of the work they did before then is still classified if it is deemed to still be relevant. It is only in 1976 anyone actually admitted they organisation existed even though it had been going for 30 years.
If someone had tried to publish anything about their work there before then they would have been thrown in prison under the official secrets act then the entire story would have been D-noticed so the press are not allowed to cover it or they suffer the same fate.
Chances are they went and asked GCHQ, the british telecommunications survelience people to provide someone.
I am sure they have some very good staff being that they invented the idea of codebreaking using computers over 60 years ago.
Also worth noting that after RSA came out and published their work on public key cryptography GCHQ admitted they had known how to do it but kept it secret. This page has some decent info:
Anyone pointing out that the refences to GCHQ are all very old should also know that they would never dream of telling anyone else if they had cracked every encyrption method known. Why create more work for yourself when your primary role is listening in to other peoples communications?
In a great many cases FOSS applications are better than the equivalent commercial sotware.
First case in point is Apache. If you want a monkey to be able to creat a web site, go with IIS. If you want to create something truly resilient to attack, that scales well enough to cope with with very high loads without filling entire datacentre with your server farm you use Apache. Take a look at the following link: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_surve y.html
I know MS has made some recent inroads in the case of active sites but the market share still shows Apache in the lead. Now some people may argue that since.NET Windows 2003 is better than apache. Maybe they are right, but apache still has more sites so maybe it is because things take time to change.
Once upon a time there was an expression in the IT industry the nobody was ever fired for buying IBM. This referred to the fact that even at the time (early 90's) there were alot of people making clones of IBM machines alot cheaper than IBM, businesses would still spend the extra for the IBM badge. It took a long time after the clones became cheaper for some IT managers to trust them and the price difference had to be rather large (enough for the manager to a large bonus if the switch worked out, other wise it wasn't worth the personal risk of embarassment).
I believe that recently the useability of FOSS products like Open Office has got to the state where departments could switch, especially in small business that currently get away with using one legal copy of office for the entire company. If Microsoft forced these companies to switch to Open Office or cough up for legal non-upgrade versions of office for every PC more people would end up using Open Office, especially in the case of staff who only use Office for reading other peoples Word documents once in a blue moon. If this many people became used to using non-MS office software it would help alleviate the perceived skills gap which prevents alot of companies from adopting it at present.
And this is even more apparent for home users (particularly students). Why do you think MS offers software to students so cheap? For the same reason the banks will throw money at students in the form of overdraughts, they are professionals of tomorrow so get them tied to you as early as possible. This is even more applicable to software where the skills involved often take years to accumulate.
It will take years for FOSS products to overtake commercial software even if they are better products due to the reluctance of most (sensible) business managers to take a giant leap into the unknown.
(Bit of a rambling reply but hopefully you get my point)
During the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989 Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 [wikipedia.org] the Red Army had to bring in military units from different regions of China as the local units refused to fire on local civilians.
They got the job done pretty well in the end though as your link demonstates.
I perhaps should have made clear in my post that I was only referring to that actual type of soldiers who would be used. In this instance they would most likely be some such special forces detatchmment who actually do a lot of killing anyway and have grown more accustomed to being asked to kill people.
I know that in Britain the SAS were instructed to kill all the terrorists who stormed the Iranian embassy some years ago. They let one live, but did kill most of them in cold blood just in case any had hidden grenades.
We also had our police force execute somebody on the tube recently as they were informed he was a suicide bomber by their commanding officer. They later discovered he was an unarmed electrician from Brasil.
These people do exist within all armies of the world. The US is not the only armed force who would never dream of hurting innocent people if they were set up to do so.
I didnt think the american media covered those stories, they just told the bit about Isreal valiantly defending there right to annex parts of other countries.
The fact remains that no matter how many guns you can get your hands on there is always one group who will have more. They are the various law enforcement organisations of the US (or any other country for that matter). You think owning a firearm of any kind will do you any good if the government decided to get rid of you?
Whether you agree with the pro-gun lobby or not the fact remains that if you were a threat to the government and they found out, the special forces they sent in could brush you aside without the slightest amount of trouble. They are better trained than you could hope to be (while trying to hold down a full time job anyway) and better equiped. They also have infintely more experience at killing people.
Now I am sure a great many soldiers would never dream of harming their own citizens. However I bet there are some that would follow any order they were given. The germans circa 1940 were not some alternate race of people bred for evil, they were just human beings like you and me, yet some of them ended up gaurding concentration camps that most of the population never knew existed.
I would also bet that with all the psychological tests soldiers are put through any decent comanding officer will have a pretty good idea who would follow his orders even if they knew them to be dubious.
So with all this in mind how much protection does that gun you keep under your pillow protect you? And even more so if the government force you to keep it locked away on the other side of the room lest your kids get at it. They could just grab you off the street and there are very few states nowadays that allow the carrying of a concealed firearm in public.
The biggest thing protecting us from all these things is not guns, but other people and how they would react to seeing people disappear. How they would tell other people and word would spread. Some may even write about this on the internet letting the whole world know what was going on and it would be very difficult to stop them unless you knew who they were ahead of time and could silence them in the first wave.
The first thing you do when seizing control of a country is quietly sieze control of the media without the populace knowing. But if the media are the people the people that becomes alot more difficult, especially if they can blog with relative anonmity using a few tools. I would hope that a great many readers of slashdot could do a pretty good job of posting to the net while hiding their identity, and not just by posting as AC. But if you can make anonymously blogging about the government a crime in itself then you make things a little easier.
No, its just the nature of politics in the states. There are plenty of countries in Europe with much fairer political systems which do a much better job of representing the people who elect them.
If you just accept that your political system is never going to represent your opinions it never will. If you try your damnedest to change it you MIGHT be successful.
The problem is that most male geeks in training don't choose to spend there entire teenage life sat in front of a computer learning the ins and outs of linux, they would much rather spend them learning the ins and outs of women instead. However being that they probably lack the social skills to ask a women the time of day let alone for a date they spend too much time in their bedroom watching Pr0n on computers.
Whereas women generally have this problem slightly less due to all the emphasis being on the bloke to go looking for a date. So maybe if more teenage girls actually went looking for a date with any guys they fancied this would even things out as the bloke in question would probably die of fright on the spot, thus evening the mix in future generations.
These problem all reall stemmed from the Compact Disk and it replacing vinyl.
We all happily went out and rebought our existing music collection on CD as it was alot more convenient than LP's. And in the process we generated a constant revenue stream as stuff was gradually re-issued. The problem is that this is now coming to an end for the record companies as they have re-released almost everything. They have certainly run out of the stuff with serious mass appeal.
So they now have to look for a new way of extracting similar revenues that they have grown used to over the last 15 years out of a back catalog which most of us already own, possibly in more than one format. The problem is that they have already made it about as convenient as it needs to be and the quality is mostly there as well (Vinyl have better infrasonic performance).
So rather than try and go back to surviving off the revenues they get from new releases which would result in a huge drop in profits they need an alternative. Without an alternative the problems would be very far reaching. The stock market is used to constant revenue growth. If profits fall it is far worse for a company than if they had never risen in the first place, expecially if the fall is not likely to be temporary. This is frequently what drives companies under if they are unable to downsize quickly enough.
So faced with this dilemma the media publishing companies must find a way to keep the boon of the CD years going, and being that they didnt reinvest those record profits very wisely in new content production this is going to difficult. So they are choosing to try and keep the boom of the CD going by constantly selling us a new copy of stuff we already own indefinately.
If you contrast this with companies like BP (who sell Oil) you see that they have invested their profits much more wisely. BP are now the worlds largest producer of solar panels and have started describing themselves as an energy company rather than an oil company.
A simple single torpedo from a sub on a "training mission" would mean the end of Sealand.
But the British Navy is a little weary of removing him by force. Firstly because any deaths caused would be a PR nightmare. Secondly the original person who squatted it (Prince Roy Bates, former British Army Major) actually had the guts to fire a warning shot across a British Navy destroyers bows when they encroached on his territory.
I agree, but good luck getting the US government to.
I love the following quote from Syriana:
"Some trust fund prosecutor, got off-message at Yale, thinks he's gonna run this up the flagpole, make a name for himself, maybe get elected some two-bit, congressman from nowhere, with the result that Russia or China can suddenly start having, at our expense, all the advantages we enjoy here. No, I tell you. No, sir. Corruption charges! Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win."
That is exactly what I was trying to recommend if you dont like their business model.
Dont you just love it when you both argue the same point, at least were not boring anyone else to death with this drivel anymore though now this thread is so many days old.
PS - I actually own lots of nvidia products as I think they are the best of a piss poor lot. I used to prefer 3dfx until they were bought because neither ati or nvidia could manage to product an equivalent product for the same price.
The case actually involved trademarks rather than domain names so pulling the DNS info just goesa to show that google now have a DNS entry they are unable to use:)
Some people believe it's very silly, at best, to create artificial scarcity for things that cost effectively nothing to redistribute -- such as software
But what if that software could be used by you competitors to reduce their overhead by using part of your code to run thier hardware product? What if your competitors could use your code to produce a product that was 100% compatible but cheaper than yours?
The fact is that there are legitimate business reasons for keeping drivers closed source. Especially if you are a company like nvidia or ati that does not want the general public to know the exact technical specs of the product they are buying. We choose to buy the product, should we not be forced to buy it on the terms of the company doing the selling? Surely the entire capitalist system is based on this?
There was an article on Slashdot a while back where it was mentioned that MS had passed the break-even point and was now making money on the 360.
Break even point does not mean they are making money on every console they sell, it means they have made money on the product as a whole and have recouped the cost of research and development. This does not preclude selling the console at a loss but making that money back on the software.
Nintendo did not used to make money on the consoles circa n64 era, I cant post a link as I actually heard this direct from someone who was rather high up the console business and I have been unable to find a link. I did find some links detailing how nintendo actauly made mode money due to price fixing though (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64).
If anyone has any decent links as to how the console business model has changed please post them.
So many rich, spoilt yanks (I am a rich, spoilt Brit) are posting to this discussion as if they have something to contribute based on their western decadent upbringing. The fact is that they are not even planning for a single one of these machines to end up in the US of A. They are intended to go to THE THIRD WORLD.
The third world consists of a great many places where buying even 1 text book for each child would break the bank for the government.
If you are going to contribute something to this discussion please try and put yourself in the position of a child in africa, who has no toys other that what they can make themselves, probably very few books and can only go to school once per week as that is all the country can afford teachers for.
In short, the kids have far worse things to worry about than eye strain, like dying of Aids because some western drug company wants a bit more profit and put the price beyond what poor countries can afford because it makes more profit in the west. And when a country refuses to follow western drug patent laws like India, did the US of A government lobbies the WTO until the country gets financially punished for trying to save some lives. (more links below)
The idea of the OLPC program is that by providing children in the third world with a decent education we can try and level the playing field in the future and enable these countries to better compete with us economically in the west. This has to done soon or the gap between rich countries and poor will become so huge that the idea of joining some looney religious sect that promotes suicide bombing will become very appealing.
If you knew that there was a high chance of dieing of starvation you might just commit suicide too, especially if you have had to watch someone starve to death as this is supposedly one of the worst ways to go. As it is a great many people from the third world are willing to risk some pretty hairy sea voyages on home made rafts just to end up in our countries and work for less than we would consider. Fast forward 10 years and who knows how bad things will get.
Once again, this post is not a troll, so please don't moderate it as such just because you dont like hearing anything bad said about the US or its residents.
Please quote your source as this sounds like bullshit.
The entire console business model is based around selling the hardware at reduced cost and then making the loss back on the licencing fee charged to games developers in order to publish on your product.
This is why all console companies have some sort of protection in place to stop third party software running without their consent. XBox's require signed code hence the problems loading linux on to them. Sony have some sort of weird dvd laser I believe. Nintendo used to love cartridges because they are much easier to patent as they are hardware.
I have no information on what methods are used for the more recent consoles, anyone care to post some more recent info?
But if the company selling the product dont want you to study, modify or redistribute either part (hardware or software) what has that got to do with anything?
I love the way that the full article even links to the vulnerability advisory and makes such a big deal out of it.
Every single piece of software ever written has bugs. Any that run in a secure area of the OS (like the kernel) but that allow input from unpriveldged processes will also have vulnerabilities (they might allow something the shouldn't). The fact that only one advisory has been found is more of a surprise, especially with all the open source fanboys trying to pick holes in the drivers.
Now ideally no piece of software would allow a direct path to the hardware (like direct rendering) from a security point of view.
But from a performance point of view that bypassing of the secure nature of the unix architecture is essential to allow people to try and run games under linux. Since the games are the only thing tying me to windows I welcome and advancements in this regard.
I would like to see an open source nvidia driver that could match the performance of the closed source driver, but I would be very surprised if this ever happens. If it does, nvidia can just change the hardware so their driver is fastest again.
This is the real problem. The actual hardware the driver has to control is not open, it is a closed proprietary product which you have to sign a nondisclosure agreement just to read the specs of. So whether the driver is open source strikes me as being a moot point.
Why discriminate between hardware and software? Why is one allowed to be a closed system but the other has to be open source in order for us to use it? Why not simply avoid all closed products if you believe that strongly in openness.
Please elaborate as to what your problem with MySQL?
I actually prefer it in many ways to T-SQL as it is alot less arsey about hand written SQL statements. But I have only been programming websites professionally for a couple of years and havent used anything like PySQL or whatever the oracle malarky is called.
I did look on your webblog thingy but couldnt find any reference as to why? I did notice you also dont like PHP but didnt go into any reasoning as to why is that just because they are usually used together (sarcasm).
PS - We might as well turn this into a debate about MySQL as talking about RMS has to be the dullest topic ever and will only pander to his already vastly inflated ego.
This is a reply too the entire thread but seeing as you were at the bottom at some point you get the reply.
I have now been a professional web developer for about 4 years. About 3 years of that was spent working for a programming house who resold to graphic design companies. Of course all the graphic designers used Macs but they very rarely asked us to produce Mac compatible sites.
The fact is that in the entire time I worked there I only had a sinlge client who even cared about firefox. If you go and take a look at how the traffic by browser breaks down, you will find IE with above 90%. So the return on investment to get your site working on all broswers is not as high as just making it work well under IE.
Most web developers or managers of web sites have access to these stats, and most do read them. So everytime some linux or firefox fanboy sends in one of these stupid whining letters we just ignore them. Or we reply with a stock letter explaining the above point about return on investment.
So when you talk about losing money through web browser incompatibility, there is only one broswer that can lose you money in this regard, and that is not supporting IE properly. In all other instances the number of people you lose probably comes out smaller than the number of users you gain for makeing the site look "nice" under IE. So most designers use flash, javascript and anything else to make their site look pretty under IE because that generates the most business.
(Disclaimer - I am not saying the above is a good thing as I use linux, but in the business world return on investment rules all.)
Slashdot Mirror
I didnt read your post, just your sig.
:)
Nice Sig though
But there are plenty of other countries where state regulation of industries like broadband, other telecoms, transportation, energy (gas and electric) and television do result in better service for the consumer at less cost. So why is that these schemes always fail in the states yet in other countries they work fine?
In europe regulatory bodies seem to have alot more success with out becomming corrupted by the companies they are supposed to regulate. I know absolutely nothing about why these things happen in the US (hence me asking this question) but I do know that the most widely known failures we have had in the UK along similar lines is in Food and Farming regulations or advertising, both of which are expected to get funding from the companies they are supposed to be keeping under control. Obviously this causes a conflict of interest. In the case of farming this resulted in some really great fuckups (Foot and Mouth, BSE).
I think the key to the successful regulation is giving the body in question generous funding and also the teeth to back any threats. Would the US constitution allow the government to form a body which could effectively dictate prices to a company without the company getting any say in the matter? Would anyone in america actually vote for a government that did such things or would they get labelled as communists long before they came into office?
I wasnt specifically talking about the world war 2 work. Look at the bit a little further down with regard to inventing RSA encryption then not telling anyone util after the inventor had died.
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Ellis
The fact is that the most recent thing they would publish now is something they did in the 70's. Anything more recent than that is still classsified. Alot of the work they did before then is still classified if it is deemed to still be relevant. It is only in 1976 anyone actually admitted they organisation existed even though it had been going for 30 years.
If someone had tried to publish anything about their work there before then they would have been thrown in prison under the official secrets act then the entire story would have been D-noticed so the press are not allowed to cover it or they suffer the same fate.
These people like their privacy
Chances are they went and asked GCHQ, the british telecommunications survelience people to provide someone.
I am sure they have some very good staff being that they invented the idea of codebreaking using computers over 60 years ago.
Also worth noting that after RSA came out and published their work on public key cryptography GCHQ admitted they had known how to do it but kept it secret. This page has some decent info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographer
Anyone pointing out that the refences to GCHQ are all very old should also know that they would never dream of telling anyone else if they had cracked every encyrption method known. Why create more work for yourself when your primary role is listening in to other peoples communications?
In a great many cases FOSS applications are better than the equivalent commercial sotware.
e y.html
.NET Windows 2003 is better than apache. Maybe they are right, but apache still has more sites so maybe it is because things take time to change.
First case in point is Apache. If you want a monkey to be able to creat a web site, go with IIS. If you want to create something truly resilient to attack, that scales well enough to cope with with very high loads without filling entire datacentre with your server farm you use Apache. Take a look at the following link: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_surv
I know MS has made some recent inroads in the case of active sites but the market share still shows Apache in the lead. Now some people may argue that since
Once upon a time there was an expression in the IT industry the nobody was ever fired for buying IBM. This referred to the fact that even at the time (early 90's) there were alot of people making clones of IBM machines alot cheaper than IBM, businesses would still spend the extra for the IBM badge. It took a long time after the clones became cheaper for some IT managers to trust them and the price difference had to be rather large (enough for the manager to a large bonus if the switch worked out, other wise it wasn't worth the personal risk of embarassment).
I believe that recently the useability of FOSS products like Open Office has got to the state where departments could switch, especially in small business that currently get away with using one legal copy of office for the entire company. If Microsoft forced these companies to switch to Open Office or cough up for legal non-upgrade versions of office for every PC more people would end up using Open Office, especially in the case of staff who only use Office for reading other peoples Word documents once in a blue moon. If this many people became used to using non-MS office software it would help alleviate the perceived skills gap which prevents alot of companies from adopting it at present.
And this is even more apparent for home users (particularly students). Why do you think MS offers software to students so cheap? For the same reason the banks will throw money at students in the form of overdraughts, they are professionals of tomorrow so get them tied to you as early as possible. This is even more applicable to software where the skills involved often take years to accumulate.
It will take years for FOSS products to overtake commercial software even if they are better products due to the reluctance of most (sensible) business managers to take a giant leap into the unknown.
(Bit of a rambling reply but hopefully you get my point)
During the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989 Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 [wikipedia.org] the Red Army had to bring in military units from different regions of China as the local units refused to fire on local civilians.
They got the job done pretty well in the end though as your link demonstates.
What sort of unit did you command?
I perhaps should have made clear in my post that I was only referring to that actual type of soldiers who would be used. In this instance they would most likely be some such special forces detatchmment who actually do a lot of killing anyway and have grown more accustomed to being asked to kill people.
I know that in Britain the SAS were instructed to kill all the terrorists who stormed the Iranian embassy some years ago. They let one live, but did kill most of them in cold blood just in case any had hidden grenades.
We also had our police force execute somebody on the tube recently as they were informed he was a suicide bomber by their commanding officer. They later discovered he was an unarmed electrician from Brasil.
These people do exist within all armies of the world. The US is not the only armed force who would never dream of hurting innocent people if they were set up to do so.
You must be a european.
I didnt think the american media covered those stories, they just told the bit about Isreal valiantly defending there right to annex parts of other countries.
Maybe I used it deliberately, but thanks for pointing it out to anyone who didn't notice.
The problem however usually lies in the choices. If the only people you can elect both agree on the key points what sort of choice is that?
Here Here.
The fact remains that no matter how many guns you can get your hands on there is always one group who will have more. They are the various law enforcement organisations of the US (or any other country for that matter). You think owning a firearm of any kind will do you any good if the government decided to get rid of you?
Whether you agree with the pro-gun lobby or not the fact remains that if you were a threat to the government and they found out, the special forces they sent in could brush you aside without the slightest amount of trouble. They are better trained than you could hope to be (while trying to hold down a full time job anyway) and better equiped. They also have infintely more experience at killing people.
Now I am sure a great many soldiers would never dream of harming their own citizens. However I bet there are some that would follow any order they were given. The germans circa 1940 were not some alternate race of people bred for evil, they were just human beings like you and me, yet some of them ended up gaurding concentration camps that most of the population never knew existed.
I would also bet that with all the psychological tests soldiers are put through any decent comanding officer will have a pretty good idea who would follow his orders even if they knew them to be dubious.
So with all this in mind how much protection does that gun you keep under your pillow protect you? And even more so if the government force you to keep it locked away on the other side of the room lest your kids get at it. They could just grab you off the street and there are very few states nowadays that allow the carrying of a concealed firearm in public.
The biggest thing protecting us from all these things is not guns, but other people and how they would react to seeing people disappear. How they would tell other people and word would spread. Some may even write about this on the internet letting the whole world know what was going on and it would be very difficult to stop them unless you knew who they were ahead of time and could silence them in the first wave.
The first thing you do when seizing control of a country is quietly sieze control of the media without the populace knowing. But if the media are the people the people that becomes alot more difficult, especially if they can blog with relative anonmity using a few tools. I would hope that a great many readers of slashdot could do a pretty good job of posting to the net while hiding their identity, and not just by posting as AC. But if you can make anonymously blogging about the government a crime in itself then you make things a little easier.
Remember - Knowledge is power.
It's just kind of the nature of politics.
No, its just the nature of politics in the states. There are plenty of countries in Europe with much fairer political systems which do a much better job of representing the people who elect them.
If you just accept that your political system is never going to represent your opinions it never will.
If you try your damnedest to change it you MIGHT be successful.
The problem is that most male geeks in training don't choose to spend there entire teenage life sat in front of a computer learning the ins and outs of linux, they would much rather spend them learning the ins and outs of women instead. However being that they probably lack the social skills to ask a women the time of day let alone for a date they spend too much time in their bedroom watching Pr0n on computers.
Whereas women generally have this problem slightly less due to all the emphasis being on the bloke to go looking for a date. So maybe if more teenage girls actually went looking for a date with any guys they fancied this would even things out as the bloke in question would probably die of fright on the spot, thus evening the mix in future generations.
These problem all reall stemmed from the Compact Disk and it replacing vinyl.
We all happily went out and rebought our existing music collection on CD as it was alot more convenient than LP's. And in the process we generated a constant revenue stream as stuff was gradually re-issued. The problem is that this is now coming to an end for the record companies as they have re-released almost everything. They have certainly run out of the stuff with serious mass appeal.
So they now have to look for a new way of extracting similar revenues that they have grown used to over the last 15 years out of a back catalog which most of us already own, possibly in more than one format. The problem is that they have already made it about as convenient as it needs to be and the quality is mostly there as well (Vinyl have better infrasonic performance).
So rather than try and go back to surviving off the revenues they get from new releases which would result in a huge drop in profits they need an alternative. Without an alternative the problems would be very far reaching. The stock market is used to constant revenue growth. If profits fall it is far worse for a company than if they had never risen in the first place, expecially if the fall is not likely to be temporary. This is frequently what drives companies under if they are unable to downsize quickly enough.
So faced with this dilemma the media publishing companies must find a way to keep the boon of the CD years going, and being that they didnt reinvest those record profits very wisely in new content production this is going to difficult. So they are choosing to try and keep the boom of the CD going by constantly selling us a new copy of stuff we already own indefinately.
If you contrast this with companies like BP (who sell Oil) you see that they have invested their profits much more wisely. BP are now the worlds largest producer of solar panels and have started describing themselves as an energy company rather than an oil company.
In a single phrase, "Diversify to survive".
A simple single torpedo from a sub on a "training mission" would mean the end of Sealand.
a nd
But the British Navy is a little weary of removing him by force. Firstly because any deaths caused would be a PR nightmare. Secondly the original person who squatted it (Prince Roy Bates, former British Army Major) actually had the guts to fire a warning shot across a British Navy destroyers bows when they encroached on his territory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Seal
I agree, but good luck getting the US government to.
I love the following quote from Syriana:
"Some trust fund prosecutor, got off-message at Yale, thinks he's gonna run this up the flagpole, make a name for himself, maybe get elected some two-bit, congressman from nowhere, with the result that Russia or China can suddenly start having, at our expense, all the advantages we enjoy here. No, I tell you. No, sir. Corruption charges! Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win."
That's why I chose not to buy their products.
That is exactly what I was trying to recommend if you dont like their business model.
Dont you just love it when you both argue the same point, at least were not boring anyone else to death with this drivel anymore though now this thread is so many days old.
PS - I actually own lots of nvidia products as I think they are the best of a piss poor lot. I used to prefer 3dfx until they were bought because neither ati or nvidia could manage to product an equivalent product for the same price.
Here's a link:d emark_dispute/
:)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/19/gmail_tra
The case actually involved trademarks rather than domain names so pulling the DNS info just goesa to show that google now have a DNS entry they are unable to use
Some people believe it's very silly, at best, to create artificial scarcity for things that cost effectively nothing to redistribute -- such as software
But what if that software could be used by you competitors to reduce their overhead by using part of your code to run thier hardware product? What if your competitors could use your code to produce a product that was 100% compatible but cheaper than yours?
The fact is that there are legitimate business reasons for keeping drivers closed source. Especially if you are a company like nvidia or ati that does not want the general public to know the exact technical specs of the product they are buying. We choose to buy the product, should we not be forced to buy it on the terms of the company doing the selling? Surely the entire capitalist system is based on this?
There was an article on Slashdot a while back where it was mentioned that MS had passed the break-even point and was now making money on the 360.
Break even point does not mean they are making money on every console they sell, it means they have made money on the product as a whole and have recouped the cost of research and development. This does not preclude selling the console at a loss but making that money back on the software.
Nintendo did not used to make money on the consoles circa n64 era, I cant post a link as I actually heard this direct from someone who was rather high up the console business and I have been unable to find a link. I did find some links detailing how nintendo actauly made mode money due to price fixing though (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64).
If anyone has any decent links as to how the console business model has changed please post them.
This post is NOT a troll.
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So many rich, spoilt yanks (I am a rich, spoilt Brit) are posting to this discussion as if they have something to contribute based on their western decadent upbringing. The fact is that they are not even planning for a single one of these machines to end up in the US of A. They are intended to go to THE THIRD WORLD.
The third world consists of a great many places where buying even 1 text book for each child would break the bank for the government.
If you are going to contribute something to this discussion please try and put yourself in the position of a child in africa, who has no toys other that what they can make themselves, probably very few books and can only go to school once per week as that is all the country can afford teachers for.
As for talking about eye strain, please follow the link below and read up about the infant mortality rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality
In short, the kids have far worse things to worry about than eye strain, like dying of Aids because some western drug company wants a bit more profit and put the price beyond what poor countries can afford because it makes more profit in the west.
And when a country refuses to follow western drug patent laws like India, did the US of A government lobbies the WTO until the country gets financially punished for trying to save some lives. (more links below)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=8684
The idea of the OLPC program is that by providing children in the third world with a decent education we can try and level the playing field in the future and enable these countries to better compete with us economically in the west. This has to done soon or the gap between rich countries and poor will become so huge that the idea of joining some looney religious sect that promotes suicide bombing will become very appealing.
If you knew that there was a high chance of dieing of starvation you might just commit suicide too, especially if you have had to watch someone starve to death as this is supposedly one of the worst ways to go. As it is a great many people from the third world are willing to risk some pretty hairy sea voyages on home made rafts just to end up in our countries and work for less than we would consider. Fast forward 10 years and who knows how bad things will get.
Once again, this post is not a troll, so please don't moderate it as such just because you dont like hearing anything bad said about the US or its residents.
Please quote your source as this sounds like bullshit.
The entire console business model is based around selling the hardware at reduced cost and then making the loss back on the licencing fee charged to games developers in order to publish on your product.
This is why all console companies have some sort of protection in place to stop third party software running without their consent.
XBox's require signed code hence the problems loading linux on to them. Sony have some sort of weird dvd laser I believe. Nintendo used to love cartridges because they are much easier to patent as they are hardware.
I have no information on what methods are used for the more recent consoles, anyone care to post some more recent info?
But if the company selling the product dont want you to study, modify or redistribute either part (hardware or software) what has that got to do with anything?
I love the way that the full article even links to the vulnerability advisory and makes such a big deal out of it.
Every single piece of software ever written has bugs. Any that run in a secure area of the OS (like the kernel) but that allow input from unpriveldged processes will also have vulnerabilities (they might allow something the shouldn't). The fact that only one advisory has been found is more of a surprise, especially with all the open source fanboys trying to pick holes in the drivers.
Now ideally no piece of software would allow a direct path to the hardware (like direct rendering) from a security point of view.
But from a performance point of view that bypassing of the secure nature of the unix architecture is essential to allow people to try and run games under linux. Since the games are the only thing tying me to windows I welcome and advancements in this regard.
I would like to see an open source nvidia driver that could match the performance of the closed source driver, but I would be very surprised if this ever happens. If it does, nvidia can just change the hardware so their driver is fastest again.
This is the real problem. The actual hardware the driver has to control is not open, it is a closed proprietary product which you have to sign a nondisclosure agreement just to read the specs of. So whether the driver is open source strikes me as being a moot point.
Why discriminate between hardware and software? Why is one allowed to be a closed system but the other has to be open source in order for us to use it? Why not simply avoid all closed products if you believe that strongly in openness.
Please elaborate as to what your problem with MySQL?
I actually prefer it in many ways to T-SQL as it is alot less arsey about hand written SQL statements. But I have only been programming websites professionally for a couple of years and havent used anything like PySQL or whatever the oracle malarky is called.
I did look on your webblog thingy but couldnt find any reference as to why? I did notice you also dont like PHP but didnt go into any reasoning as to why is that just because they are usually used together (sarcasm).
PS - We might as well turn this into a debate about MySQL as talking about RMS has to be the dullest topic ever and will only pander to his already vastly inflated ego.
This is a reply too the entire thread but seeing as you were at the bottom at some point you get the reply.
I have now been a professional web developer for about 4 years. About 3 years of that was spent working for a programming house who resold to graphic design companies. Of course all the graphic designers used Macs but they very rarely asked us to produce Mac compatible sites.
The fact is that in the entire time I worked there I only had a sinlge client who even cared about firefox. If you go and take a look at how the traffic by browser breaks down, you will find IE with above 90%. So the return on investment to get your site working on all broswers is not as high as just making it work well under IE.
Most web developers or managers of web sites have access to these stats, and most do read them. So everytime some linux or firefox fanboy sends in one of these stupid whining letters we just ignore them. Or we reply with a stock letter explaining the above point about return on investment.
So when you talk about losing money through web browser incompatibility, there is only one broswer that can lose you money in this regard, and that is not supporting IE properly. In all other instances the number of people you lose probably comes out smaller than the number of users you gain for makeing the site look "nice" under IE. So most designers use flash, javascript and anything else to make their site look pretty under IE because that generates the most business.
(Disclaimer - I am not saying the above is a good thing as I use linux, but in the business world return on investment rules all.)